


Little Foxes

by Clockwork_Roses



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Major Original Character(s), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slow Burn, also there is a literal fox, awkward violence, introspective, it's a goddamn novel what can I say?, post-colonialism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-03-08 01:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13447794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clockwork_Roses/pseuds/Clockwork_Roses
Summary: After the operation in Washington D.C. goes bad, the Winter Soldier and his handler contact Steve Rogers in an attempt to make a break from HYDRA.  In the quiet aftermath, all three of them struggle with the burden of their shared and separate histories-- the atrocities they have both witnessed and been complicit in-- and the difficulty of moving forward, all leading to a single question:What does it mean to be a truly good person?





	1. 6:48pm

> “Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of 'full-spectrum dominance,' its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.  Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.”

-Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”

  
  


The agent- “Nemesis” to those who know  _ of _ her and “Kita” to the handful who know her- keeps precisely in step with her escort. The accompaniment is unnecessary; she knows where she's going. She doesn't need protection. No, the escort is there because their highly-questionable American associates don't trust her. But then, she doesn't trust them, either.

She stays a hair's breadth behind her escort, not so far that anyone would notice, but enough that if it came to it, she would be able to see an attack coming just a little bit sooner. It's never good practice to give up any advantage, anything could make a difference. Well, not really, because one guy with an assault rifle, in a series of too-small corridors? No. Really. You shouldn't have.

They round the last corner and come to a metal-plated door flanked by two guards. One of them exchanges a nod with her escort, who turns on his heels and leaves.  _ Back to doing crossword puzzles and trading crude jokes with your fellows? _ she wonders, sneering internally at the lax American standards of discipline.

The guard pulls the door open and she steps through into a room so heavily reinforced that it looks distinctly like a bank vault. More guards are arrayed around the space, weapons trained on the man partially restrained at the center of the staggered group of guards, the dull grey metal of his left arm marked by a red star.  _ If one of them fires, just one, doesn't matter if they hit him, if they so much as pull the trigger,  _ she is going to kill them. Not quickly-- she is going to tear their entrails out with her bare hands.

They have no right to threaten him, much less to harm him. She understands why what they are doing is necessary. But the risk inherent in doing so is theirs to assume- if they can't do it right, they shouldn't do it at all. Better to pull back, to regroup, and quite possibly, to find a way to accomplish their objectives without drawing upon such volatile resources, given how badly he's reacting. She doesn't have the authority to order that, though, doesn't even have the authority to tell the guards to stand down.

She steps forward, closer than any of the guards will go, well within his reach. A tense moment ripples through the guards when she crosses that invisible line, but she does not share it, and neither does he. She knows he will not attack her. What runs through the two of them is not trust, exactly, but a well-worn certainty. She is  _ the thing that does not hurt _ .

He fixes her with a look that is scared and hurt and lonely.

There has always been a part of her that has wanted to wrap her arms around him and smooth his hair and whisper assurances in his ear. To feed him a litany of beautiful lies and distractions. And now that part of her awakens, unfolds feral and angry.

“I knew him,” he says, beseechingly.

“ _ Tell me _ ,” she replies, and her Russian is a fluid staccato.

She makes a motion with her hands, so small and indistinct that the guards are sure not to notice, but to him it is a signal, part of a system of hand signs they share. This one means, roughly,  _ Careful, we're being watched _ . Under regular circumstances, either her Russian or the sign alone should suffice to indicate that they had best use a means of communication less transparent to the guards than spoken English. But this is a breakdown of regular circumstances, and she can only hope that both together will be enough.

And aside from her mistrust of the situation, she feels that, for what she is trying to do, Russian is... safer, somehow. That is, for what she now regards as their highly-questionable American associates have ordered her to do. The only reason she's going to actually try is because the alternative is worse, and no one who has the authority to do so seems inclined to be sensible and  _ call the mission off _ .

Because she is not the one who does this. It is important, it is vital to the way that things work that she is not the one who does this.  She is the thing that does not hurt.  She wonders if the Americans are trying to undermine her by asking her to do so. But that would hardly be to their benefit. More likely, it is merely one more symptom of the incompetence and impatience that have plagued the whole operation.

“ _ The man on the bridge, who was he? _ ” he says. Russian. Good.

“ _ It was no one. A ghost. A trick of the light. _ ”

She knows that it is important that he does not make sense of this. She has been given enough of the truth, of its darker moments, that she should be able to condemn the subject of his focus with nothing but fact, but right now that won't suffice. No matter what she says, she won't be able to get him to believe her. It isn't what she does, what she's trained for. The best she can hope for is confusion.

“ _ I knew him _ ,” he says again.

She's losing his focus. She has to try to call him back.

“ _ Tell me _ ,” she says, softly insistent, molding her voice into a sympathetic tone. “ _ Tell me this dream, and let it fade in the light of waking _ .”

He doesn't respond. She holds out for a moment more, waiting, hoping she hasn't really lost him, but it's no use. She steps back, defeated. This isn't what she does, she reminds herself. There was only so much she could hope for. But the alternative is worse.

One of the guards must already have noticed that she was preparing to leave, since as she turns away from him, she is ushered towards the door, and towards another escort that is already waiting for her.  Just as she is about to pass out of the circle of guards, she turns.

“ _ Волчонок _ ,” she says,  _ volchonok _ , and it catches his attention, now, when it's already too late, the look between them running sharp, taut, and ragged.

“ _ In the end _ ,” she says, “ _ when it's all over. When the last capitalist pig is dead and the world can finally remake itself. I promise, I will put a bullet in your head. And then, I will put one in my own. I promise _ .”

None of the Americans have understood, she thinks, judging by their expressions. But something about her tone has alerted them.  _ Good luck translating  _ that _ , assholes _ , she thinks, as she walks out the door towards the waiting escort.

It's a woman this time; young, pretty, made up in the American fashion, with cosmetics even for this situation, wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster. Smiling.  _ Liar _ . The woman is better at not letting her hang back, but while Kita notices, she is not inclined to care. She keeps her head up, shoulders back, face dispassionate.  She tells herself that she cannot hear his screams echoing through the hall. No, the soundproofing should be far too thick for that.

She does not ask herself what she has become, because she has not become anything. She is the same thing she has always been: she is Nemesis, the dark twin, the conduit for karmic vengeance. She is someone willing to make necessary sacrifices, to pay in blood and sleepless nights. The captivity of one for the liberation of many-- it is a reasonable exchange.

Her certainty, her loyalty to their purpose are the qualities for which she has been chosen for this task. To shadow him in the field, to assist when appropriate, to report back, to give minor direction, all alongside accomplishing her own objectives. She is not his partner, not his handler, and certainly not his friend, but something else, something for which there is no name.

But it is a delicate thing. What he associates her with. What she sees, what she knows, what she doesn't see.  The events today have put all of that at risk.  She cannot discount the possibility that someone is working to undermine her and her position. There is a report to be made, and she will not delay to make it.

They exit the hallway through a door flanked with another pair of armed guards. She is about to part ways with the escort when the woman leans in, unexpectedly, and whispers something in her ear.

“Hail HYDRA.”

A flash of steel, and Kita steps away, weapon already concealed. Blood blooms across the woman's shirt, and her lips are parted in a frozen gasp of shock and pain. The dying woman collapses, slowly, to the ground.

“You were infiltrated,” Kita tells the guards, who reluctantly lower the weapons they have trained on her. When she is certain that they have accepted her explanation, she turns and leaves.

This isn't the first time that's happened over the course of this mission. At best, their American associates have been seriously compromised. And at worst? She pushes the possibility aside.  _ Slander. _

But rest assured, this incident is going to feature prominently in her upcoming report.

 

* * *

 

So the mission fails, and in the ensuing chaos, Kita makes her way back to the cheap motel room that has been serving as their base. She isn't surprised at the outcome, the whole operation has been badly planned and executed, and she figures it's probably for the best. She's unclear what they were even meant to accomplish in the first place. Destabilizing the US, the largest Western power, certainly, but how was  _ this _ method of destabilization supposed to foster a political climate favorable to their wider aims?  It doesn't matter now. All that is left now is to get back safely and minimize additional casualties and security breaches.

A message from her superiors. She looks down at it.

_ Report _

Not a question, not even a real command, just a single word without punctuation. She hesitates, then replies.

_ Contact delayed _

He didn't make the rendezvous yesterday afternoon. He could be dead, but she doubts it. Probably just wandered off the reservation a bit. Not unexpected, and any measure to prevent it would likely be counterproductive.   _ The looser the leash, the longer it reaches. _

She receives a response.

_ Ensure contact _

She interprets this as an instruction to do as she has been doing, and wait. She has left the appropriate signs, invisible to most, which will serve as instructions to him. That is enough.

While she waits, she does minor maintenance on her equipment. Sidearms taken apart, cleaned, oiled, reassembled. Knives whetted and honed.  Electronics checked for charge, tested, wires re-coiled and secured. Ammunition laid out, counted, inspected, and re-packed. Sniper rifle taken out and  broken down, examined piece by piece, then reassembled and returned to its case.  She is well-practiced at this kind of routine, and falls into an easy rhythm.

Last of all are her signature weapons, a pair of smoke-dark blades, shaped like hunting knives and almost long enough to qualify as short swords.  She hones the knives carefully, then oils them, lightly, and replaces them in their black-lacquered box.

In the lingo of the intelligence community, she couldn't be called a ghost, not really, but with her  _ castillano  _ Colombian background, she can easily pass as an ordinary Latin immigrant. Once she has finished going over her gear and securing it in the motel room that they are using as a temporary base, she decides to take advantage of this relative freedom to go for a run.

Before going out, she pauses at the motel sink.  If she wants to blend in-- and she does-- she should don the uniform of decadent Western women; concealer, eyeliner, and lipgloss.  To think that this is, to them, going without makeup-- she is well aware that it is, she has gone undercover at formal parties that required far more elaborate preparations-- but to think it, only fuels her disdain for American superficial frivolity.

This accomplished, she sets out on a meandering circuit of the surrounding area.  Trees and grass are vibrantly green in the mid spring, the air not yet heavy with summer heat.  Kita slips into the patterns of reconnaissance out of habit, noting strategically significant points and pinning them to a mental map as she goes.

Over the next several hours, she repeats the exchange with her superiors, word for word, five times.

_ Report _

_ Contact delayed _

_ Ensure contact _

Each time, she fears that the instructions will change. They do not.

It is late at night when he returns, and when he arrives, she is out, wandering the halls, telling herself it's some sort of security routine. When she gets back, he is standing in the middle of the room, brow furrowed and looking spectacularly out of place. He doesn't do civilian clothes well. It isn't really his area.

She closes the door, taking precautions so that they won't be disturbed.

“ _ Волчонок--” _ she starts,  _ volchonok _ , but is cut off.

“ _ Let's go _ ,” he says.

She's glad, she tells herself, that he's the one who says it. That was the purpose, after all, of letting him come back on his own terms.

“ _ Okay _ .” She half-pauses. “ _ You're hurt _ .”

Not a command, not even a question, just an observation. But the way he looks back at her, not with suspicion, just a sort of passive expectation, is a reminder that this exchange has implications more sinister than she will ever be willing to say out loud.

“ _ You want something for it _ ?” she asks, almost casual, sticking to the charade.

A moment's pause, and then he makes a noise of assent and goes to lie on one of the two twin beds.

She walks over to a plastic case on top of the faux-wood laminated dresser, lifts the lid, and retrieves a syringe. She uncaps it, flicks any bubbles to the top, and corrects the dosage. She is focused, methodical. She puts off facing him until the very end, and then, when she moves to stand over him, she doesn't meet his eyes. She bends over his exposed right forearm and the sharp accent of the alcohol swab cuts through the lingering odor of oil and gunpowder solvent. She locates the vein and slides the needle in, one thumb over the injection site to stabilize the shaft of the needle as she pushes the plunger down, slowly. Her hands are steady. She is very good at keeping them that way.

When she is done, she disposes of the alcohol wipe in the trash can in the linoleum-floored bathroom. The empty syringe goes in a box with several other identical ones. There is no way of properly and discreetly disposing of them, given the current situation.

It's just a light sedative, she tells herself. A light sedative and a mild painkiller.

_ Yeah, right. Why not tell yourself it's just anti-nausea medication _ ?

Leaning against the far wall, she sinks to the floor, the stained berber carpet, letting her head fall back against the wall. She can hear the way that, across the room, his breathing changes, slowing without deepening, settling into a pattern she knows well.

_ Report _

_ Contact achieved. Awaiting transport. _

She receives no immediate reply.

This is what she hates about joint missions. There are parts that are, if not enjoyable, at least invigorating, challenging. A chance to prove her competence. The moments of fluid coordination-- of hand signs exchanged in the height of an ambush-- hold a sense of mechanical grace that not even ordinary adrenaline rushes can touch.

But then there are moments like this, when the frail illusion of camaraderie is brushed aside and the two of them are revealed for what they really are: a captive and his jailor.

 

* * *

 

It has been more than a month, and spring is leaning into summer.  Her superiors must be scrambling, sending Kita and her charge back out without even leaving time for him to return to cryostasis.  But never would be too soon for another mission on American soil, much less another mission in DC. Either that, or it has already been far too long.

_ Report _

Kita looks down at the message, considering her reply. Barely ten minutes ago, she confirmed for herself that he took down the latest target, the senator. Now, he's gone missing again, and she does not bother telling herself that he's just gone for a walk, or that his faltering compliance is in any way comparable to a piece of faulty machinery, the way the lab techs do. Given the timeline, if she pretends to be busy, she has maybe an hour's leeway.

She is unsure.

She is aware that HYDRA has been blamed for the actions she took part in. She is also aware that those assigning the blame may well be intentionally slandering her and her allies-- after all, if those responsible for her actions were a group of known fascists, opposing American values of freedom, justice, and apple pie or what-have-you, there will be no need to acknowledge the fact that anyone else might have cause to take up arms against the United States and its interests for other reasons.

Too many questions have gone unanswered. She has reached the end of her faith, her blind and binding loyalty.  She needs to talk to someone who will not lie to her. Not knowingly, anyways.

There is a convenience store not far away, where she is able to procure a burner phone.  _ Why are these things still legal? _ she wonders. She can hardly think of a reason that someone would use one for anything less than criminal purposes. She wouldn't be surprised if some measures have been taken- her credit card number recorded and sent to a database somewhere or a tracking chip embedded in the phone's case. Since all information attached to the purchase of the phone is as disposable as the phone itself, none of these precautions would so much as inconvenience her.

It isn't hard to find someplace secluded, at this hour. Most people are at home or asleep, and the ones that aren't tend not to look too hard at her. She doesn't need absolute secrecy, can't get it without establishing a secure location. She just needs to keep out of anyone's direct observation.

The first park she comes to, she keeps walking. It's got those faux-historic lamps that screw with her night vision and don't provide enough light to compensate. The second park is fully dark, and has a gravel running path, to boot. She follows it around to a spot that has good sight lines, instinctively, though there's not much she plans to do if anyone comes by, and she isn't expecting anyone to be looking for her.

Is she putting the call off? Probably.

That she has the number at all is something of a security breach.  _ Work in this business long enough _ , she thinks,  _ and you get pretty well used to security breaches _ .

She dials.

Somewhere across this long, low, well-manicured wasteland of a city, a phone rings. The poor audio quality resounds tinnily in her ear. Perhaps it will keep ringing, will click over to voicemail without anyone answering.

“Hello?”

She doesn't find the voice at all familiar. Isn't it one of those voices that an ordinary American would know? Not that anything about the phrase “ordinary American” can be used to describe her.

“Who is this?”

“You believe the Winter Soldier is controlled by HYDRA.” Her voice is flat, impersonal. “Tell me why.”

The static whisper of indrawn breath, and then, more insistently, “ _ Who is this _ ?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Where are you calling from?”

She is silent. He should know better than to ask her that.

“Why are you doing this?”

She hesitates, then decides to tell him as much of the truth as is prudent. “I have been given conflicting information. I want an honest perspective. If you convince me, it may tip events in your favor.”

She knows she's giving him every incentive to lie, but she still feels certain that he won't, or won't be able to do so convincingly. There is a moment's silence before he begins, and the words come tumbling over one another in a long and somewhat disjointed first-hand account. She listens silently, noting unconsciously all the places where he intentionally tries to leave things out. Then, before he starts asking questions again, she hangs up, dropping the phone a ways off the jogging path, and moves on.

_ Target reached. Moderate complications, some delay. _

She picks up the pace. She has some moderate complications to fabricate. She doesn't know how much time it's going to buy them, but right now, she isn't about to give up any advantage. Anything could make a difference.


	2. 10:31pm

> “Today we see the results of this system run amok.  Executives at our most respected companies hire people at near-slave wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops.  Oil companies wantonly pump toxins into rainforest rivers, consciously killing people, animals, and plants, and committing genocide among ancient cultures.  The pharmaceutical industry denies lifesaving medicines to millions of HIV-infected Africans.  Twelve million families in our own United States worry about their next meal.  The energy industry creates an Enron.  The accounting industry creates an Anderson.  The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.  The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet.
> 
> And we wonder why terrorists attack us?
> 
> Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy.  I wish it were so simple.  Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice.  This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy.  It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits.  This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.”

-John Perkins,  _ Confessions of an Economic Hitman _

  
  


Steve Rogers has been chasing a ghost. The beginning of the chase lies further back, nestled with the stolen file at the bottom of his desk drawer. Since then, it has been a long period of waiting, hoping that someone who feels like they owe him some loyalty or a favor finds some intel they can throw his way. But a little over two months ago, the nature of the chase changed with a strange call in the middle of the night.

The caller had sounded like a woman, but she had refused to say who or where she was. She was probably not someone he should be communicating with directly like that, and what she had asked for was difficult in its own right, aside from possibly constituting high treason. But if what she implied was true--

He had decided that it was worth the risk.

The next morning, he had woken to the feeling that someone else needed to know. He ran through the list of potential confidants. Nick Fury? Definitely not.

Natasha? She was the one who had stolen the file for him, and she had seemed amenable to his offer of friendship, but she had also indicated that she was at least a little unfamiliar with the concept, and he couldn't forget the sense of anger he'd gotten from her when she first told him about the Winter Soldier. What's more, he could only begin to imagine her frustration, as an inveterate spy, at hearing that he had handed sensitive information over to a likely enemy agent in return for pretty much nothing.

Sam Wilson? Sam understood, surely, what it was like to lose a friend in combat. How it would be worth almost anything to get them back. But he couldn't forget what Sam had said:  _ Maybe he's the kind you stop, not the kind you save _ .

No, Steve is alone on this ghost hunt.

Then the letters started. The first one was signed “Adrienne.” It was written on pink, flowery stationary with a sparkly pen. It sounded feminine, teenaged, or in hindsight, it sounded like a slightly overblown imitation of what a teenage girl would write.

He is used to fan mail. Someone delivers a packet of it every week-- doubtless pre-screened-- and he has made a habit of reading and replying to all of it personally. It helps, he thinks, on the days when he wonders what he did it all for, helps him to feel like a fitting part of the world. Each exchange he shares with the people who write him letters is a connection, spider-silk thin, to the great, wheeling, teeming, bustling thing that is life.

The letter from Adrienne seemed ordinary, another glimpse through the eyes of someone for whom the world was still clean and bright and filled with things that Steve had long ago given up as insignificant. It was sweet, and admiring, and perhaps a little infatuated. And then, toward the end, there was one line that was very much out of place.

_ I'm with you to the end of the line. _

The shock of it slammed through him as if it were an actual explosion. If he hadn't been sitting, he would have fallen.

_ Who could possibly have known _ ?

He read the letter over and over, searching for anything else, any other sign or hint.  There was nothing.  But as the initial paralysis of recognition wore off, he realized that there were a number of options, other than the most favorable one.

His conversations could have been observed, reported, recorded; the files kept in an office somewhere, made accessible to S.H.I.E.L.D., and through them, possibly leaked to HYDRA. They could have heard it from  _ him _ : whispered, screamed, murmured in his sleep. The letter could even be genuine, and Adrienne could have picked the line up from some publicity material Steve had overlooked.

Steve had every reason to doubt the authenticity of that line. He held onto the letter, weighing the options, for almost a week. And he found that he  _ could not _ give up, could not uncurl his fingers from the grasp he had on that faint and fleeting hope.

And so he wrote back, cautiously:

_ Dear Adrienne, _

_ You remind me of an old friend, someone I knew a very long time ago. _

He finished the letter as if he really were writing to Adrienne, but even then, he had begun to think of her as only a fiction. He posted the response as soon as he had completed it.

A few days later, the response was returned, undeliverable.

The next letter was from “Sophia.” Different name, different return address, different stationery and pen, but if he looked very closely, past the way one dotted their i's with little hearts and the other turned all horizontal lines into tildes, he thought that the handwriting could very well be the same. And there was another line, another phrase that no one should have known.

He replied to Sophia immediately, but the reply was again returned, undeliverable.

To the next two, he responded with postcards reading,  _ WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT _ ? These were also returned. After that, he wasn't sure what to do, and held onto the next three, carrying them around with him like talismans.

Then came the letter from Lillian. At first, he held onto it like the others. But given all the other constants, he was beginning to suspect that the information the letters were really meant to convey was contained in the return addresses-- they were all local, and all different. He tracked down the address that “Lillian's” letter had been sent from, and found himself at an empty storefront in the middle of a strip mall left bare by the ailing economy. He got the sense that he was on the right track, and just needed to get there sooner. At least the abandoned location explained the undeliverable replies.

The next letter, he acted more swiftly, traveling to the condemned house in a downtrodden neighborhood as soon as he got the letter. But it, too, held no answers, and was unremarkable in every way except for the evidence of a recent shooting- bullet holes in a few remaining window panes, spent casings scattered in the overgrown and browning lawn, and a slug lodged in the peeling yellow siding.

He sat down on the crumbling steps that led up to the boarded-up front door, resting his forearms on his knees, and looked out at the house, the neighborhood, the whole quiet mess of it. The house was in a middling state of disrepair, barely distinguishable from the inhabited houses on either side of and across the street from it. He saw broken windows repaired with cardboard, sheets or scraps of fabric tacked up as curtains, and dark, empty rooms beyond still, empty windows.

The street was calm-- too calm to bear the evidence of such recent violence. Far away, he could hear traffic, but here, there were barely even pedestrians. Sound drifted from the houses nearby, of people talking and cooking and playing music. He hoped that no one had been hurt.

Now, he is waiting for another letter. He brings the weekly bundle of fan mail up to his apartment, hurrying while trying to look as if he's not hurrying. On the way, he sees one half of the young couple who live next door to him, the tall, beautiful woman with a long sheet of white-blonde hair falling down her back. He nods in greeting and she returns the gesture.

He knows, now, that the woman and her husband, with the dark glasses and messy hair, are Secret Service, sent to watch and watch over him. And he knows that his phone is tapped. Steve Rogers is not, and can never entirely be, a private citizen.

His apartment is done in olive and taupe, with accents of aubergine. He was more a spectator than a participant in that process. He remembers wondering, bemused, when paint colors got so international. He's generally pleased with the outcome; sometimes it almost feels like home.

He leaves his keys on the table by the door, jacket thrown over the arm of a chair. He paces the length and width of the main living area as he opens the letters, each in turn, and reads through them briefly. The fifth letter that he opens, addressed from “Isabelle,” is the one he's looking for. The postmark is only a day old.

He knows, instinctively, that he must go alone and unarmed. If he does otherwise, he knows that he will find nothing. He knows that this could be leading him into an ambush. Someone in the government could use his connection to a notorious assassin, and his suspicious activity around that connection, to discredit him. HYDRA could lure him somewhere, as vulnerable as he will ever be, and capture him, or send agents to kill him. And if they are particularly thorough, or particularly cruel, they could send the Winter Soldier to do the job. He could be walking into a trap with open arms.

But he is tired of this nothing, this haunting absence. He is tired of going in armed. He is tired of leading others into danger. And so, just this once, it does not grate too hard against his principles to go alone and unarmed.

After a twenty minute ride, he pulls up a block away from the address that the letter was supposedly sent from. He leaves his bike and walks up to the spot. It's a construction site, a house, though it looks somewhat abandoned. Weeds have sprouted, vibrant and lanky, around the base of the foundation, and the bare beams of the skeleton house have begun to turn grey in the sun.

At first, he fears that this letter, too, will be a dead end. Wind rustles through the dry grass in the parking strip as he approaches, but he senses no one. Then, a shadow flickers somewhere inside the beams of the partial house.

He walks up to the house slowly, cautiously, each step torn between the desire to rush towards reunion and hesitation at the thought of all the things that could go wrong. The range of possibility, about to be crystallized into a single reality, seems so wide, and the sliver of favorable outcomes so achingly narrow. At the empty space where the front door of the finished house would be, he lingers for a moment before dropping down to the concrete foundation criss-crossed with hairline cracks.

He moves through the house's shell, searching room by framed-out room. He follows the floor plan out of something like habit, vaulting indiscriminately over the thigh-high beams that fill the rooms, but picking out the points marked for doors to cross the ones that separate the rooms. And then he turns and  _ there _ \--

He has found his ghost.

They stare at each other momentarily, not twenty feet apart. Steve looks into those eyes, the lines of that face that he knew so well, so long ago, searching for a glimmer of mutual recognition.

And then a whistle sounds, somewhere nearby. The moment breaks and the other lunges at him. The instant before he catches a shoulder to the chest, he thinks,  _ I won't fight you. I'm done _ . He wills himself not to strike back, not to brace for the impact and stand his ground.

They go down clumsily, in a half-roll and a tangle of limbs. It occurs to Steve that unless he finds a knife in his ribs pretty soon, this is not the assault he was dreading. A round of shots flying through the space he had just occupied, fired from somewhere overhead, confirm this suspicion. One bullet is lodged in a beam near where his head had been not a whole second ago-- someone up in the unfinished rafters is shooting at him, and the shoulder to the chest was meant to protect him.

And then the shots are answered from somewhere outside of the house, and he has to re-evaluate the situation once more.  Was it him those first shots were aimed at, or whoever returned them? His assailant/rescuer is getting back to his feet, and he does likewise, and tries to take what cover he can in the hollow frame of the house, though he doesn't know from what direction to expect fire.

The two of them are together again, he thinks, fighting side by side. But everything about the situation is altered, wrong, uncertain. He doesn't know who they're fighting, or why, or whether they're fighting each other.

For a little while, the fight unfolds at an even pace, punctuated by gunshots and choked groans. Steve tries to advance on the enemy positions, whether to attack them or to tell them to hold their fire, he doesn't know, but the covering fire is too heavy, and so, as he is unarmed, he can do little more than watch.

Somewhere on the street outside, he hears tires screech to a halt, followed by footsteps pounding on pavement and shouting voices. Towards the opposite side of the house, a small explosion goes off, shaking the beams of the frame. He doesn't know who triggered it, or how, or why, but in the aftermath of the shockwave, he is able to overtake one of the shooters and an assault rifle.

The fight has turned scrabbling and chaotic. Everyone is moving, himself included, and there is no real cover. He resigns himself to firing only at those that fire at him first, and that turns out to be all of them, except for those two: the shooter in the rafters (if he discounts that first round, considers it aimed at whoever returned fire) and-- Bucky? The Winter Soldier? He doesn't know, can't stop to figure it out. He has to keep moving, keep trying to understand the fight.

He hears a shout behind him and turns to see that an enemy combatant has a clear line on him, but has hesitated as another target- speak of the devil- has revealed itself. Before any of them can act, a dark form drops down from above- the shooter in the rafters. He glimpses a figure in dull black combat gear before the two vanish below the thigh-high floor beams, and then again as it departs, moving fast and low. The target of this attack does not rise.

He cannot get a clear look at the attacker from the rafters. Glimpses, through wooden slats and out of the corner of his eye, but that is all, and he doesn't dare prioritize getting a better vantage. But he senses that he is in the midst of an unfolding mechanism of combat. The two of them- the one from the rafters and the Winter Soldier/Bucky- are launching a coordinated assault. They are using both visual and audible communication-- he catches snippets of whistled signals and hand signs that, to him, are empty of meaning.

Reluctant to kill combatants who may well be acting in good faith and with good cause, Steve finds himself doing little more than providing short bursts of covering fire as the other two advance.  The shooter from the rafters stays low, mostly out of sight, while the other one, his ghost, strides forward.  This visibility draws the attention of one of their opponents, and before he can take a moment to consider the action, Steve has taken aim and squeezed the trigger.  As his target’s eye erupts in a gout of blood, Steve sees a dark silhouette, the shooter from the rafters, gun also trained on the dying man.  He will never know which one of them fired the killing shot.

The flow of the fight shifts, the chaos resolving into a final directed push. Despite the reinforcements, the opposing force is running out of active combatants. Most of the remainder are retreating, and while they continue to harry and pursue the depleted force to prevent a regroup, the other two seem willing to let them go.

When the retreat is finished, the transport vehicle pulling away, fishtailing down the empty residential street, Steve finds himself in the bare shell of a front room, face to face with--

He puts the safety on the gun he's holding, drops it, and holds his hand out.

“Bucky. Buck-”

The other holsters his gun, looking back with suspicion. “I know who he is.”

“But you-”

“I know who he is,” he repeats, more forcefully.

The insistence sounds less like resolve and more like defensive uncertainty, so Steve lets it go. That he seems to remember, that he uses the present tense-- for now, he tells himself that this is enough.

Looking around, he spots the attacker from the rafters moving towards them. It's a woman- his mind flashes to the woman on the phone that night- with long black hair and light olive skin, latina maybe. She moves methodically, clearing the floor beams with a bare-bones efficiency of motion.

Suddenly, a form rises up in front of her- one of the assailants must have forgone the retreat to lay in wait. But before Steve can say or do a thing, she grasps the man by the shoulder and plunges a long, dark blade through his torso. He can only look on in surprise and mild horror.

She yanks the knife out with the same brutal motion, lets the man drop to the ground, and continues towards the other two. As she reaches them, she kneels to clean her weapon on the unmarked uniform of one of the fallen attackers.

“We need to move,” she reports. “They'll be back soon.”

Steve nods. The advice is sensible enough, whether or not he's willing to listen to her otherwise. He starts searching a body for identification.

“Don't bother.”

He watches her as she straightens up, sheathing her knife.  The thought strikes him that she is, by conventional measures, quite beautiful, and this somehow makes everything worse.

“Don't you want to know who's after you?”

“We already do.”

“Who is it, then?'

“Everyone.” She looks away, presumably scanning for any other lingering threats.

That sounds about right, actually. The Winter Soldier is still wanted by a wide array of U.S. and foreign agencies, and he can hardly see Hydra letting their assets walk away like this.

Speaking of which, Steve notices that his friend-turned-unwilling-assassin hasn't said a word during the exchange. He attempts to make eye contact, but the latter stares, cold and rigid, into the distance.

The woman clears her throat conspicuously. She holds herself straighter, more at attention. She's likely hiding impatience behind the rigid demeanor, and he remembers what she said--  _ they'll be back soon _ . And there will be more of them, and better equipped.

“There's a Motel 8,” she says, “about a mile that way.” She points. “Room two-fifty-three.”

“Is there a signal, a knock or--”

She cuts him off. “There are entire manuals of protocol. You don't know them.”

She calls out something that sounds like “volchonok” in what must be Russian, and it catches the attention of-- her companion? charge? partner? She says something else, also in Russian, and with a look back at Steve- a look Steve finds he can no longer interpret- he starts moving out, and she falls in at his flank.

“Hang on!” Steve shouts.

They turn back, and, yes, he can see a hint of annoyance in the corners of her mouth and the crease between her brows. But she has allowed herself no more than that.

“What's your name?” he asks, gesturing at her.

“I go by Nemesis,” she replies curtly.

A ghost and a spirit of vengeance. How appropriate, he thinks to himself. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders,  _ what is she avenging _ ?

He nods, to indicate that this answer will suffice, and heads back to his bike.

He calls Natasha on the way over, tells her to have the hunt for the Winter Soldier called off.

“You think I have the authority to do that?” she asks.

“No,” he replies, “but I think you can find a way to do it anyways.”

They go back and forth for a bit, but when he hangs up, Steve has her assurance that the Winter Soldier has nothing to fear from the US government.

When he gets to the motel, he goes straight to the room, trying to pretend that he knows what he's doing, where he's going. It isn't hard; the building has a simple layout, and everyone here is a stranger just passing through. He finds the room without incident, and raises his hand to knock on the door, but before he can complete the motion, the door opens and the woman- “Nemesis,” though he isn't especially partial to codenames-- pulls him inside, closing and bolting the door behind him.

The other one, his ghost, is sitting inside on the bed, shirt off, non-robotic shoulder wrapped in gauze. Steve can't recall seeing either of them take a hit, but now that he considers it, the woman has probably been favoring one leg. They've been running for months, he recalls, flashing back to the abandoned house with the shell casings littering the overgrown lot.

The rest of the motel bed is scattered with first aid supplies-- rolls of gauze, bottles of antiseptic and disinfectant, cotton swabs, a wad of used bandages showing glimpses of blood, a sewing kit,--

_ Months _ , he reminds himself, running from  _ everyone _ . It's a bit impressive that they're doing as well as they are. He's glad that the chase is over.

If it can really be over. Thinking back to the conversation he had with Natasha on the way over, he is fairly certain that she only agreed to help because of the broadly-hinted possibility of an opportunity for direct observation of the hopefully-former Soviet-Hydra assassin. But faced with the man in question, Steve wishes that the specter of surveillance could be lifted. What if the conditions, the compromises made of his surrender are too great? What if it pushes him back across whatever lines he's crossed to get here?

But the time for those negotiations has not yet come.

Tilting his chin at the woman, he asks, “Can we trust her?”

The two assassins share a long, unflinching look, such that he is surprised by the answer when it comes.

“No.”

She nods, and slips out the door without further comment.

Steve settles across from his old friend, looking into his eyes.

“So,” he says. “You know who he is.”


	3. 11:50pm

> “In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs to their long undoing.”
> 
> -Italo Calvino, _Invisible Cities_

 

He had passed the point of collapse some time ago, some time during the two months of running, and hadn't noticed it at the time. Rest had been something regulated, a resource, like food, or gauze rolls, or fuel, or ammunition. Something fed with caffeine pills and clipped hours of sleep.

He kept going. That is what he was trained for. He kept going through the waiting; endless, tense, in empty, forgotten places. He kept going through the hotel, through a reunion that felt studded with glass shards, and then afterwards through the cavalcade of shuffling reorganization that followed.

He insisted on having his own place. Somehow, if he couldn't tell everyone else to leave, he would keep leaning on vigilance and caffeine pills. He didn't have words to explain it, but he remembers Steve looking over at him,  _ listening _ , even to the things he didn't say.

When he has his own place, a small, unassuming apartment, not in a good neighborhood, according to... someone-- that was funny, as if he weren't the most dangerous thing anyone around here would ever come across. But when he is there, at last, and everyone else isn't, he goes straight into the bedroom and lets exhaustion take him.

The first time he wakes up, it is too dark, too quiet, and he starts screaming not because of some memory-turned-nightmare, but so that he will hear his own voice. So that it will keep back that darkness, that silence, that dulling of sight and sound and feeling that threatens to un-make him, always, as it has un-made him so many times.

_ Sensory deprivation.  _ The term echoes dimly in his mind.

He stopped fighting a lot of things, but he never stopped fighting that. Never stopped screaming until his voice was gone. Never stopped straining against the restraints. Once, the straps were loose, and he ripped the nails out of two fingers before anyone noticed. Blood tinting the tepid water as the tank was opened, all in a panic. Hands on him, roughly pulling him out. Voices sounding loud and sharp around him. The clean bite of his wet hair on the back of his neck and the wet clothes. The flare of pain in his hand, deep and raw. Noise and alarm rising around him as he stands quietly in the middle of it, keeping his head down and drinking it all in, the cold and the pain and the light and the noise.

The look of concern on the face of the technician, the time after, checking the straps to be sure that he couldn't hurt himself again. As if it weren't better, the pain. As if it weren't better than  _ nothing _ .

When his eyes adjust enough to reassure himself that he is not sealed in utter darkness and utter silence, he shuffles into the other room and turns the radio on. Not loud, it doesn't have to be loud. Just so that when he wakes, he can hear it, a little, and know that he is in a place where there are things to be heard.

He falls asleep on the couch, for a while, but it's an uncomfortable position, so he wakes up eventually and goes back to bed.

He doesn't know how long he sleeps, only getting up occasionally to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom. But it isn't often. His body has entered a sort of minimal function, a state akin to hibernation. Sometimes when he gets up, it is light. Sometimes it is dark.

He dreams. He hasn't dreamt in a long time, at least since before they were running, and then it had as often as not been from the depths of a drugged sleep, the dreams distorted, strange, unreal.

He dreams of long, low halls lined with identical metal doors, walls streaked dark, and the sounds of barking dogs and ringing bells. He dreams of a field covered in snow, and of things found and lost again in its expanse, and of grey smokey copses of leafless trees, of a dark line of woods cutting across the landscape, and of animals, of foxes and wolves, running in the snow. He dreams of every time he has seen blood spilled.

At last, he opens his eyes at some point and feels truly awake. He does not know what time it is-- light is showing from around the edges of the metal blinds in the window, but he can't judge its intensity, nor the angle, and even if he could, he is not familiar enough with this place to do anything with the information.

He walks out to the kitchen. He finds that he prefers to go barefoot, to feel the bristle of the cheap carpet and the chill of the linoleum on the soles of his feet. He moves softly, quietly-- not shuffling, but like a cat, careful, almost, except that he does not put any effort into it.

There is a note on the kitchen table, on a small sheet of blue-lined paper, ragged along one edge. He feels that the handwriting should be more familiar than it is. He reads it slowly, haltingly, skipping over pieces and doubling back, trying to hold the words, the sentences in his mind all at once and they keep falling out. He puts the note down.

How long has it been since he last read something? Something longer than brusque signs-- the names of places. So many places, so many names, all so short, that he was trained to recognize, rather than interpret. Everything else-- the instructions, the briefings-- was verbal.

He finds that the kitchen has been stocked. He feels his muscles tense at the intrusion, but it's not like he wants to go to the store, not like he can see that turning out well, he can hardly even begin to pull together an idea of how to buy things, or what a store looks like, never mind how backwards and outdated his point of reference must be.  Since sometime long in the past, everything he has used, everything he has needed, has been given to him; issued, checked out, placed into his hands.

There's a coffee machine on the counter. It has another little note on it, this one short, just “coffee machine.” He knows that, actually. He's used to those, albeit an older and, as it turns out, less functional model. He feels oddly dissatisfied, standing back and watching this one operate, smoothly. As if he has been cheated out of the opportunity to thwack it a few times every now and again to keep it working.

He takes the coffee plain, black. He does not know if he has always done this, or if it is a habit he has developed recently, recently being in the past seventy years. Which, to him, has also been--

He's not sure. Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten?

There are records, somewhere, he knows. Meticulous records, everything written down. Times taken to the nearest minute, nearest second. He saw them, witnessed the grids and numbers and notes, but they are secret, forbidden, and he gave up trying to read them a long time ago.  It wasn’t worth it.

They stole time from him. Not merely the time he spent in their thrall, or trapped in cryosleep, but the significance of time itself, the meaning of it. Perhaps, sometime, he will have the means and the motivation to take it back. But now, there is a lull to it, a sort of trance state, and he cannot bring himself to mind.

Now, armed with coffee, he tries the note again. He reminds himself, several times, to go in order. He puts it together, working line by line, repeating each line over until he knows what it means before moving on to the next. He hates how painstaking it is, how it takes two and a half cups of coffee to get through. But this, reading, is something that he  _ will _ pry from the jaws of--

He needs a name for it, perhaps, that thing that hovers at the edges or engulfs him, orders, confusion, noise and pain, all things disjointed.

But he is here now. In the kitchen. It is quiet, mostly, except for the radio. The blinds are slitted, he likes them this way-- the light can get in, but outside stays out. The light has gotten paler, he thinks, since he got up. It must be nearing midday. He is sitting at the small table, might be nearly as old as he is, with half a cup of cold coffee and the note from Steve.

He knows that name, the significance of it, a bit, but his understanding of the name and its meaning float on the surface of a sea of fragments. He tries not to let it weigh on him, the sheer scale of the task of putting it all back together.

The note says he should call, if he wants to, and gives detailed instructions on how to do so. There is a cell phone, next to the note. Contrary to what Steve must think, given the note, he already knows how to operate a cell phone. He's familiar with a wide array of communication devices, even if he usually wasn't the one making contact.

He gives himself some time to think, and decides that now he very much wants to make contact. But calling?

The first call goes significantly less well than he hopes it will. He hears Steve's voice, recognizes it, and that's about it. Speaking is out of the question, he's only about half-sure he knows what Steve's saying, he just sits there for a couple minutes, maybe, while Steve sounds more and more worried. He doesn't want Steve to sound worried, but it looks like doing anything about it just isn't in the cards, so he hangs up.

He tries again, several times, scripting out the conversation in his head over and over before each attempt, but it's no use, he can't seem to get things going on track, and when he looks back, he's not sure whether the script was ever really fully formed or if it was actually a jumbled mess of intent. Something there he is desperate for, something he can't put into words or even fully conceive of. Maybe it has to do with words, maybe they're a part of it, or a means to it, or maybe it has nothing to do with words, but either way, he can't seem to make words happen.

At last, Steve- Steve knows it's him, now, if he ever didn't know- says, “All right, unless you tell me not to, I'm going to come over there.”

He spends a while very clearly not saying no, before realizing that this could be taken as an attempt at refusal, and hangs up.

He waits. He is used to waiting, to those spaces in time, both tense and calm, hanging on the anticipation of that moment, that event that will break the impermanent stillness. He is used to it enough that the anxiety stays submerged, covered by the act of waiting.

A key sounds in the lock. Steve doesn't knock, doesn't announce himself, has a key, of course Steve has a key, but it is a sudden end to the waiting, that muffled metal scraping, and he is on his feet, alerted, muscles taut and primed. Steve opens the door slowly and just hangs there, in the doorway, forced-casual.

Steve tilts his head. “Hey.”

He nods back.  _ This is how you greet people _ .

He is on the edge of panic. There is something- something, he does not know what, but it tugs at him, there is an urgency to it, it is right here, he does not know what it is, but it is right here, in front of him, and he cannot let it get away.

“Can I come in?” Steve asks.

It takes him a moment to realize that he should respond, that nodding will be an adequate way to do so, and another moment to actually follow through.

Steve steps inside, keeping close to the wall, not too quick to approach, looking almost sideways at him, relief and concern and joy and assurance all fighting for a place on the features of that familiar face. Slowly, with such enormous slowness that he should be put at ease, but that the exaggerated care loops back around on itself and sets him on edge, Steve steps forward, reaches out, pulls him closer and wraps strong arms around his shoulders.

He fights it for a moment, but he is not beyond this, not beyond the comfort of human contact. He stays here, leans in, rests his head on Steve's shoulder. Steve's shirt smells deeply familiar, the scent of worn cotton, shaving lather, and sweat, dragging him down through all those past lives.

He is not safe and he knows he is not safe, that this does not make him safe. The world continues to turn, war and pain and suffering and death ripping through it, and he is not immune to any of this. The world continues to turn, but this, this place, this moment, Steve smelling the way he has always smelled and the warmth of his body, this can be a fixed point around which it turns, and for now, at least, that is enough.

They talk for a while, or Steve talks and he listens, mostly, letting his hair hang between them. He doesn't have much to say, and getting it said is an effort. He realizes he's said something in Russian when Steve's face goes worried and uncomprehending.

He can't remember having trouble telling the difference between the two languages, but until now, there has been a certain immediacy to his life. In its absence, at last, he begins to sort through less apparent aspects of experience, through memories more and less tangentially related to the present situation, and he loses track of little things that would otherwise have been instinct.

“I only woke up earlier today,” he repeats, in English this time, and Steve's expression softens, looks almost happy, but the worry lingers in the corners of his mouth, though Steve is trying (of course) to hide all of it.

He remembers always trying to cheer Steve up, always trying to erase that worry, to make him smile. Telling a million stupid jokes. He remembers Bucky doing those things. He is glad, now, that Steve does not return the favor.

Steve moves off to the kitchen, fixes sandwiches, brings them back. He hasn't eaten in a long time- a week, maybe. He should be nearly insensible with hunger, but he is divorced from the feeling, and even presented with food, his sense of it remains distant, as if he is taking a reading from a gauge whose needle sits firmly at the bottom of the scale. He eats not because he is driven by hunger, but because abstractly, he knows he should.

_ It is _ , he thinks,  _ a very Western sandwich _ . When he had been awake, they had fed him like they did any other operative, with a variety of nutritional products which seemed aimed more at meeting his physical dietary needs, likely without a great deal of resources on hand, than at providing a satisfying dining experience, or for that matter, at looking like food.  One of the few recognizable constants, however, was bread, and it was common practice to put whatever else was on hand between two slices and call it a sandwich, and he himself had done so frequently enough.

This, however, was not one of those sandwiches.  

He smiles to himself. Steve notices and looks at him quizzically.

He gestures at the sandwich. “It has frills.”

Steve chokes a bit laughing.

Steve stays into the early evening, when the light goes amber with blue shadows, showing him around the apartment, the kitchen, showing him where things are, how they work. He says nothing, and Steve looks back at him expectantly from time to time, but he really has nothing to say, at least, nothing worth the effort of saying it.

Before leaving, Steve pauses by the door, takes him by the shoulder, the right one, so that he can feel the roughness of Steve's palm and the strength of the fingers on his skin, he's expecting it this time, well enough, anyways, that it doesn't alarm him.

Steve says, “I'm here for you, alright? You call, I'll be down here as fast as I can, drop pretty much anything for you, short of saving the world. But I'll wait for you to call.” And then, with one last squeeze, one last reminder that Steve is on his side and is damn well going to stay there, Steve lets go, reluctantly, and ambles out, with one last look back before crossing the threshold out into the world again.

He moves to the door, holds onto it as he watches Steve go. Even in the dying light of early evening, the outside world is bright and intrusive, and he hangs back in the shade of the dimly-lit apartment. Steve glances back at him a few more times, maybe wondering if he has something to say.  _ Maybe you shouldn't be staring like this _ , a part of his brain suggests, but that part has long ago lost veto power.

He is... not glad, exactly, that Steve is gone, but relieved. It has been a very long time since he interacted with anyone without a conditioned or partly-conditioned response ready and waiting for him, without a mission or a sense of command or a drugged indifference or the tingling rush of adrenaline standing between him and his own actions. It is harder than he expected. Even before, running and afterwards, that was almost a mission, an anti-mission. Now, the strings are cut and he must act for himself.

He is having some difficulty with the idea of self. It is like a little glass bubble, and he is afraid that if he so much as looks at it too hard, it will shatter. A small void, a space in the middle of things that he has been.

The Winter Soldier. Bucky. He knows who they are, has a pretty good idea of which memories to attach to each. But for right now, he would rather leave them be. He knows they are there, knows he will come back to them, but not yet.

Steve has not called him Bucky again, he appreciates that. Has not tried too hard to recall him into their shared past. He feels the push of it anyways, the silent expectations, but for now he pushes back. Not that they're bad memories, ( _ not that there aren't _ ) but he thinks that by reaching into that golden past, he will contaminate it, that it will darken if he claims it, that he will lose that light. And he is not ready for that.

And the other? The other is sharp and dark, gunmetal and hard edges. He is careful in approaching it; it is merely sleeping and could roar to life with an industrial screech at any moment. It is, perhaps, the name that he should give to that thing, that presence that he feels, that has claimed so much from him and which he knows he must, eventually, hunt down and kill.

And yet, that fragile thing, that  _ self _ , is drawn also from the Winter Soldier. He could try to undo that, try to rip out all the pieces that he owes to that thing, and yet... and yet it is an act of violence which gives him pause. And yet--

A memory.

It is dark, and everything aches with cold. He is coming out of cryosleep. He is aware of Kita first by her breathing; it is louder than her footsteps. It must be night or he would have seen light through the door as she entered. She moves closer, circling the room as if she thinks it might contain some threat, until she is standing over him. For a while, everything is still.

Then, he feels her hands on his. Her touch is soft, but somehow, not gentle-- as she runs her fingers over muscles, bones, tendons, he is reminded that her knowledge of these structures is methodical, practical, that it stems from her training to sever, to destroy, to incapacitate and kill.

But now, that is not what she is doing. She is trying to bring life and warmth back into his right hand, slowly. The effort is so small, against such great odds, it should be ineffective, lost in the deep cold that lies over and through his body. That it is not-- that he can actually feel the tiny fires of warmth her fingers have kindled-- make it seem all that much more pitiful and thoroughly outmatched.

She stays there, with him, in the dark and the near-silence, to keep this vigil, to perform this act of kindness.

_ He is not beyond this, not beyond the comfort of human contact _ .

He hates her for that. Hates her for thinking there was such a thing as kindness from her, that it was not just playing into their hands, not just a part of the machine built to use him as a weapon, as a blunt instrument of pain and death. Hates her for reminding him that he is not, that he is human.

There were others before her, that were  _ the thing that does not hurt _ . But he cannot recall any of them going so far down that knife-edge path of blind faith and false trust. It was a delicate balance, and she was at once perfect and terrible at maintaining it, all the while acting on instinct and impulse, ignorant of the full scope of her double-edged betrayal.

He has not seen her since the motel. He can tell that she is there, watching, still ready to fight if anyone comes after him. But she is keeping her distance, not making herself known. He is probably the only one who is aware of her presence.

In his less lucid moments, he sees her, or remembers seeing her, as a column of dark flame, encased in ash. He is aware, or begins to be so, that anger is all she has left, aside from despair.  It is that outrage upon which she sustains herself. And with this, the realization slowly surfaces that this is a path that he, too, could be going down.  That he could spend the rest of his life hunting down HYDRA and making them pay for what they have done to him.  And there is a possibility, however slim, that he does not want to.

He has found himself the inhabitant of a strange, muted space, of hushed voices and dimmed lights. It is a luxury, and at first, he is simply willing to take advantage of it. He does not like to think about it as a recovery. Recovery, he has been taught, is what one does from injury or exhaustion. Once he is rested, body healed, he becomes vaguely aware of something, a half-forgotten memory, that sneers at him for laying around, for doing nothing and making excuses. The sentiment lacks insistence, though, and it is without too much difficulty that he is able to let it pass without affecting him too deeply. Still, he does not like to think of it as a recovery, this interlude of undefined and indistinct shapes and ideas, of barefoot-softness.

Steve comes and goes, when he calls first on the phone, at uneven times of day. He still hasn't gotten around to actually speaking when he calls, though face-to-face he finds it easier, and they talk, quietly, in half-connected flurries of words. Steve brings groceries and household items, and he usually has coffee made by the time Steve gets there.

He knows this quiet will not last. He will move away from it, away from the muffled and shrouded world. And he will have to-- he will have to answer for the past, will have to submit himself to scrutiny if he wishes to complete the transaction that has begun, of passing out of the hands that have controlled him and into others, hopefully genuinely beneficent. To start with, there have been whispers about a medical exam.

The first time he ventures outside, he does so alone. Before or after, he doesn't let Steve know. He doesn't push it, doesn't go far, just a few steps out the door, blinking in the light and waiting for his heartbeat to slow. It never quite hits baseline, but after a while he figures that's close enough, and goes back inside.

When he waits outside for Steve-- not the next time, or the time after that, it takes him a few tries before he feels quite ready-- and Steve keeps looking like he can't quite believe it, like something might go wrong at any moment, they nod at each other in greeting. It's a joke now--  _ this is how you greet people, right? _ \-- they could use some other form of greeting, and this, the bare minimum, is a recognition of that, of how far he's come. And he's outside, and Steve is looking at him like he might break.

He cocks his chin back, a gesture from the long-forgotten past. “Eighth wonder of the damn world. Man exits front door.”

Steve laughs and there's an edge of worry there but it's a laugh all the same and he'll take it.

And so the whispers of a medical exam stop being whispers and coalesce into a rudimentary plan, and that into the day itself, in the back of Sam Wilson's car, with Steve beside him resting a hand on his wrist-- his left wrist-- and idly tapping out a rhythm with one finger.  He tries to decide whether to tell Steve that he can feel it, actually, but doesn’t.

Then they pull into a parking lot bordered neatly with startlingly green grass and thin strips of flowers gone to seed. The facility is government, and while it isn't obviously so, he picks up on the signs. Bureaucracy has a certain pattern to it, of things done more times than strictly necessary, and of particularly stubborn front desk workers, and, most unsettling to him, of surveillance.

It takes hours, tests and procedures and about half a dozen kinds of imaging and a litany of medical staff in variously colored scrubs. It goes well enough, generally, and he makes it through the blood draws and the prodding and the lights and questions and all the things that hum and clank and beep around him, but Steve is there, always, right beside him, and he has to keep glancing over, through the hair he has left long and should probably have washed earlier, to remind himself that Steve is there. He only starts to hyperventilate twice, he thinks that's pretty much a god-damned miracle.

Until the blood pressure cuff. They barely have it on him, and then he's not here he's--

The whitewashed room, with the large mirror on one wall and the water stain down the other. Not huge, but large enough to feel bare, with two chairs and a metal table. He sits in one chair, and opposite is... someone else, or several people in one. A man with silver-rimmed glasses that glint like knives.

The man asks questions and he answers without stopping to think. If he gets a question wrong, or hesitates, lights pop behind his eyes and pain snaps through him, especially through his right upper arm, where there is a cuff with thin brown wires trailing back to the wall. He does not remove the cuff, does not even touch it, or the pain and lights will get worse, disorienting.

He certainly does not lunge at the interviewer. He does not upend the table between them as he rushes from the chair, every inch of his body crackling with agony before he wakes up lying on the floor, aching, his mouth tasting of copper and iron, as the interviewer stands over him, glasses glinting. It is not the first or the last time he blacks out in that room.

But he is not in that room.

Steve has him pinned against the wall and is leaning in close, calling a name that used to be his, calling him back. He pulls back, pulls the fight out of his muscles and buries his head in Steve's shoulder so that he does not have to see. He does not have to see the orderly cowering in the furthest corner, to see the medical equipment scattered around the room, swept from the counters, to see the pale blue splatter on one wall, with shards of glass still sticking to the liquid where a jar of antiseptic was thrown, to see the hole in the other wall where a fist slammed through the sheetrock and plaster--

_ He did this. _

He is panting, pulse racing, body shaking. He keeps his head down, keeps not having to see what he's done. He balls his fists in the front of Steve's shirt. Steve shifts the grip on his shoulders from a restraining hold to a consoling one and makes reassuring noises, forced-calm sounds that he can't pick apart into words right now.

He knows, from a long history of combat, that he isn't going to be fine. Not now, anyways. Not for a while. He's going to be shaking, pulse and breathing off baseline. But he shakes off the worst of the panic.

Steve twists to face the orderly, and one hand drops down to the middle of his back.

“I trust that will be all,” Steve says, and  _ wow _ is that not a question.

The orderly makes choked noises in reply, and he's not sure what is said, but he can tell that the gist of it is that the orderly isn't about to put up a resistance.

He chuckles into Steve's shirt, and yeah, there's a definite hysterical edge there, and stammers, “Punk.”

He gets a somewhat cryptic shoulder squeeze from Steve in response.

On the way out, Steve keeps a hold on his shoulder and from anyone else it would be a precaution, a point of control in case he goes off again, but Steve is just trying to protect him.  _ Kinda behind the eight ball on that one, buddy _ . He doesn't really feel the reproach of that thought, just the regret of it.

During the ride back, Steve deflects a couple of questions and then Sam Wilson clues in and stops asking. When they pull up to the apartment, close enough to the front door that he can imagine crossing the intervening distance pretty easily, actually, Steve helps him out like an invalid. He wants to protest, to point out that he is perfectly capable. But he is tired.

Sam rolls down the front window and leans out.

“If you need anything at all, you've got my number,” and Steve nods solemnly, and it's pretty clear from the inflection that it isn't just about hitching a ride in Sam's car, but he can't be bothered with figuring out what.

He fumbles for the key at the apartment door, but Steve has a key,  _ of course Steve has a key _ , and it's out already and the door already opened.

Inside, they crash on the couch together, or he crashes on the couch and Steve follows and they're lying in an untidy pile and he does not even have the energy to care about personal space boundaries, he thinks it's kind of funny, actually, they way they’re tangled together.  He just gives in and lets the backwash of the day's exertion pull him into the depths of sleep.

When he wakes up, it's still dark out, the orange-tinted light of the streetlamps mingling with the first hints of predawn grey. Steve is still there, still asleep on the couch with him, probably didn't move an inch the whole night. He untangles himself carefully, so that he can let Steve sleep  _ and _ go to the bathroom to take a piss and throw some water on his face.

He gets back and Steve is still asleep, not really a surprise, he doesn't make much noise moving around. The light outside is stronger now, paler, but still diffuse. The radio chatters away, it's not tuned very well and the signal slips in and out of static. He could probably turn it off, things like that aren't bothering him as much anymore, but there's a sense of habit to it, an inertia.

He moves off to the kitchen to get some coffee started, leans against the counter and waits for it to brew.

The apartment is still pretty bare, despite Steve's offers to help him decorate. He doesn't want more things, though, he likes it stark, likes the way the light moves through it like breathing. He can't really put it into words properly, maybe Steve could do it better, but then maybe it would just end up all technical, and that's not it at all. It's the plain, clean lines, and the way he can see them all and know them all and get past them to the subtle shades of the space in between, to the motes of dust floating through the first rays of bright sunlight as they pour through the open blinds.

The light shifts as Steve approaches, comes over to stands in the kitchen doorway.

Steve nods and says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” he says back.

Steve comes over and leans up against the counter next to him. “How you doing?”

“Fine.” He smirks. “Be a hell of a lot better if you hadn't kept me up all night snoring.”

Steve absolutely doesn't snore, and they both know it. Steve elbows him in the ribs, lightly, and they glance over at each other, grinning.

Before the silence that will follow has a chance to settle in, he says, “It's okay, you know, it's okay if you call me Bucky.”


	4. 1:29am

> "'I deplore brutality,' he said. 'It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves  _ any _ treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.'"

-William S. Burroughs, _Naked Lunch_

 

The test results come back well enough. It's a relief, Steve doesn't even know he's been worrying about that until he gets the call. He isn't entirely sure why they're calling him, rather than Bucky, but--

But he can deal with that.

He doesn't know if he could've dealt with hearing that the results held a death sentence.

Instead, the worst thing they've found is a slightly worrying level of mercury in his blood. Admittedly, vital signs were well out of the normal range and blood chemistry was likewise unusual. But, as the doctor on the phone muses, they don't really have a baseline to compare the results with, and going by performance tests and imaging, everything looks pretty much fine.

“Excuse me, sir,” Steve doesn't know if the man on the phone holds rank, but he thinks a medical degree deserves a “sir” either way, “but am I really the person you should be telling this to?”

On the other end of the line, the doctor clears his throat. “Until further notice, you are are our primary contact on the case. Sir.”

He has almost forgotten the bureaucracy of it. So, “until further notice,” Bucky will have, what? No right to privacy, no say in what happens to him except for what Steve gives him? Which would have been fine, would have been all he could handle a month ago, or even a few weeks ago, but--

But government agencies are never flexible enough to keep up with the people they are created to serve.

Steve has always been somewhat in awe of the great grinding wheels of state. Even their ponderous motions serve to underscore their immensity. And he can never forget the cruelty such machinery is capable of, if it falls into the wrong hands.

He wonders if he can hear a hint of that, now, in the doctor's eager deference. But no, the man on the other end of the phone is too busy speculating on further tests and their probable results to be worried with furthering fascist agendas. It is intense curiosity, nothing more, Steve tells himself. But he can hear the clipped notes in his own voice as he thanks the doctor and ends the call.

The call over, Steve knows there are two things which he should do- bring Bucky into the loop about his medical results and check in with Sam. He's been keeping in close contact with Sam Wilson throughout the whole business-- at least, he has since the whole business wasn't a closely-held personal secret. He feels a twinge of guilt over that, over having kept Sam and Nat in the dark. But, he tells himself, it seemed like the right choice at the time, and now, everything's turned out for the best.

And in the interest of not keeping people in the dark about things they should know, Steve figures he should fill Bucky in on the situation with the medical exam first. This means a trip out to Bucky's apartment, since even though he's been doing better talking over the phone, it's still not really anything approaching communication.

He calls ahead, though. Bucky picks up on the third ring, which Steve has noticed is something he does with absolute consistency.

Steve says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” the reply comes.

“The doctor just called me with your test results. Is it all right if I come over there?”

This is met with a few seconds of silence, which is about average for this sort of thing.

“Yeah okay.”

Another pause. Steve waits it out, holding on to see if Bucky has something else to say, and for what might be the first time, it turns out that he does.

“Pick something up on your way?”

“Sure. What do you want?”

Steve has been bringing Bucky groceries, since he's pretty sure his friend isn't quite up to shopping yet, and he's used to swinging by the store on the way over. Bucky's never asked for anything specific before, and Steve feels a twinge of cautious optimism at the thought of his friend beginning to express a personal preference. But when Bucky lists the items- white chalk, an empty, clear glass bottle, and two yards of cotton twine- his optimism turns to confusion.

It doesn't matter if he doesn't understand what Bucky wants with the items, even if that lack of understanding sparks in Steve a hint of apprehension. It's like this every time he glimpses that vast unknown in his old friend; he has to wonder if whatever Bucky's doing now edges on that thing that is not him. But it's worth it, worth the uncertainty, to let Bucky do what he wants, to trust him. Steve brings the items, as well as the usual assortment of groceries, trying to meet Bucky's specifications exactly.

Steve lives in a good part of town; nice, well-maintained buildings, lots of trees and little patches of greenery and flowers, bustling cafes and boutiques, and a constant stream of well-dressed pedestrians going about their business or merely out for a walk.

He only has to travel a few blocks when he sees the first shift in his surroundings.  The switch is quick and jarring, like the shells of buildings gutted in the war, where you could step through what looks like a perfect ordinary doorway into ruin and desolation.  Here, the same historic buildings have a more dilapidated air, with chipped paint and boarded-up windows.  Gone are the local businesses, the landscaping, and the casual pedestrians.  The transition of the people he sees from mostly white in his own neighborhood to hardly white at all in these others is not lost on him, and it tugs at him the way that the ache of a bad tooth would.

Bucky’s place is further out, past the borders of the old city.  The road leading there takes him past strips of businesses; battered motels advertising monthly rates, pawn shops, liquor stores, smoke shops, and the occasional strip mall, its storefronts vacant.  Nothing looks new, but nor is it venerable in its age.

The look of the buildings is familiar: in it, Steve sees the same hand of minimalism that shaped tenement of blocks and cracker-box houses, worked now in different shapes.  From time to time, signs of life fight against the barren structure of it-- colorful bits of cloth pinned over windows, or patches of flowers cultivated in defiance of the ubiquitous swaths of concrete that cover most of the ground.

When he gets to the apartment, Bucky is waiting outside, leaning against the stained grey siding, right thumb hooked through his belt loop, left arm more out of sight by his side, even covered with a long-sleeve shirt as it is. He looks up to see Steve arrive, and he doesn't quite smile, but Steve can see the flicker of anticipation in his expression just the same.

When Steve gets close, Bucky moves to greet him, and they meet in a moment of confused shuffling. Then Steve takes hold of Bucky's arm- his right arm- and for a little while, they just face one another, the two of them fixed points in a field transformed by the relentless flow of time. Then Bucky turns and leads Steve inside, and Steve catches a glimpse of a lopsided grin as they go.

They stop by the kitchen first, Bucky leaning against the counter and watching as Steve takes groceries out and puts them away. The fridge is plastered with faded yellow post-it notes covered in Steve's writing, and he is careful not to dislodge them.

At first, when Bucky started asking about the past, he tried bringing photos, the images captured and preserved by SHIELD and others, since anything that had actually belonged to Steve was long gone. But Bucky had not responded well to the photos. Steve could only imagine how hard it must be, to look at the features of a face you should remember but can't. So, he had stopped bringing pictures. Instead, Steve writes down anything that comes to him, anything he remembers, on post-its, and brings them over with him. Bucky has kept them, collecting them, almost, and sticks them up all over the fridge.

“How've you been?” Steve asks.

Bucky shrugs. “Well enough, as far as I can tell.”

It's only been a day and a half since Steve last saw Bucky, but he asks anyways. Steve can tell that Bucky isn't lying or fronting about things being okay, so he hasn't had any sort of major episode. What's more, the way he phrases it tells Steve that he's adjusting, getting used to the background noise, the low-level aftereffects of what he's been through as a new sort of normal. Steve figures it's probably for the best.

Not knowing what to do with the things Bucky asked him for, Steve leaves them on the counter. He sees Bucky look at the items, but neither of them say anything. Steve doesn't want to put off talking to Bucky about the test results, and as to what Bucky's thinking, Steve has no idea about anything to do with the request.

They traipse back into the main room, Steve in the lead, and settle side by side on the threadbare couch. Steve relays the information he has received from the doctor as Bucky listens, silent and still.

“They want to have you under ongoing observation,” he concludes. “Bucky, Buck--” He waits until those piercing blue eyes fix on him, recognition taking a slight edge off the habitual stare. “This isn't something you have to do, if you don't want to.”

But that just makes Bucky look at him like a hurt animal, simmering panic submerged beneath a vacant sort of pain. He gives it a minute, and the expression fades, but Bucky still doesn't speak. It's only then, with a pang of guilt, that Steve realizes that he's lied. He shifts in his seat and looks away.

As much as he wishes that the United States government was the sort of entity that would do what he knows should be done, and wouldn't place any unwarranted demands on Bucky, he knows that's not really the case. To whoever's handling this, what Bucky represents is primarily a huge security risk, one barely outweighed by his potential as a source of information. He doesn't know if they are aware that Bucky worked as the Winter Soldier against his will, and he's increasingly convinced that they might not care.

“This isn't something anyone should make you do, if you don't want to.”

“But they will?”

Steve is glad that Bucky's talking again, glad even at the hint of anger in his voice. This is something worth being angry about. He tries to formulate a response, tries to resolve all the vague hints and suspicions he's been picking up about postures and contingencies into something real and concrete to offer Bucky. He can't.

“Never know until I push back?” Bucky asks.

Steve sighs and nods. “That about sums it up.” Looking back towards Bucky, Steve sees that the hurt animal look has returned. But this time, at least he knows he's being honest about the situation.

“I know,” he begins. “I know this has got to be a nightmare.”

“Well,  _ yeah _ .”

Steve tries not to flinch at the reaction, reminded that this situation could be the subject of a literal nightmare that plagues Bucky. “You gonna push back?” he asks.

Bucky sits stock still and quiet, eyes fixed straight ahead, not particularly responsive. Steve waits it out without feeling any particular impatience. After a while, Bucky leans back on the couch, in that old, familiar, sprawling way.

“Nah,” he shrugs. “Not worth it. Besides, what am I gonna do, wait 'till I'm laid up to know something's wrong?”

“But the test results--”

“C'mon, Steve. Those tests were done blind. With nothing to compare it to, they have no idea what the results even mean.”

Steve studies Bucky, and he seems more present, more like himself than he's been today, maybe more than he's been all week. Steve nods.

“So,” he says, “not this time. But when you do think it's worth it, you know I'll be there with you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Bucky lets the assurance hang in the air for a moment, then raises himself to his feet. “Mind hanging around here for a bit?”

Steve would never turn down such a request, not from Bucky, unless he absolutely has to, which he does not, and he tries to convey all this in a single inarticulate noise.

Bucky disappears into the kitchen and reappears with the items he asked Steve for: the white chalk, the glass bottle, and the ball of twine. Without a word, he crosses to the door and goes outside. Steve considers following him, but given the lack of an invitation to do so, he thinks better of it and decides to stay on the couch and wait. He hears the sound of breaking glass, and a few minutes later, Bucky is back, coming to sit on the couch beside him. Steve shoots Bucky a quizzical look, but the latter has returned to a state of not replying to quizzical looks.

The minutes stretch on as they sit there, silent as a pair of owls. Then, a knock sounds at the door. There isn't anything unusual about the noise, but just the same, Steve highly doubts that it's a neighbor come over to borrow a cup of sugar. As Bucky moves to answer the knock, he gets to his feet carefully, positioning himself strategically so that he still has a good line of sight on the door, but his back is to the wall, and someone entering the room might not see him right away.

Sure enough, Bucky opens the door and it's the woman from before, “Nemesis,” the other assassin from the abandoned construction site. She is dressed in dull, black, loose-fitting clothing, maybe even the same outfit as before. Dark eyes glint warily from her fine-featured face, and black hair tumbles loose over her shoulders. She hangs back and crosses her arms over her chest. For a moment, they just stand there, all three of them; her outside, Bucky holding the door open, and Steve towards the other side of the room.

Bucky is the first to move, stepping towards the woman and raising his arm as if to take her by the shoulder, and then the two of them explode. He leaps back, a knife clattering to the ground between them, while she backs away, waving her arms and shouting in Russian. Steve can't understand what she's saying, but piecing together the preceding events, he thinks that the gist of it must be that she's berating Bucky for having startled her.

She must catch herself off-guard with something she says because she stops suddenly, staggering over a word before pressing the back of one wrist to her mouth. Through all of this, Bucky stands motionless, watching her, the line of his shoulders stiff.

Steve tries to think of anything he can do to improve the situation and comes up blank, so he doesn't interfere. He isn't even entirely certain what the situation is, much less what Bucky hopes to gain by it. After letting the moment drag on for long past the point of awkward discomfort, but not quite allowing the woman to finish being upset, Bucky asks her, in English, “What are your plans?”

She grits her teeth against an emotional outburst. “I don't know,” she says.

“You won't turn yourself in?”

She glares back at him. “What HYDRA did to you-- what I helped them do-- was wrong, and I'm sorry. But you know what would happen to me if I did.  What they do to terrorists.  I don't owe you that.”

Bucky doesn't respond immediately. Steve can't see his expression, since he's facing the wrong way, and he doesn't know what it would be if he could. His guess would be a blank stare, but he can't be sure anymore. He keeps a close watch on “Nemesis,” alert for any sign of danger, but nothing she does is particularly threatening.

At last, Bucky tells her, “Well, if you were thinking of leaving, don't,” and then he shuts the door, very much in her face.

Neither Steve nor Bucky make any immediate move, listening as the woman on the other side of the door retreats, presumably back to wherever she came from. When she's a safe distance away, Bucky turns, features set in a hard, inscrutable mask.

Steve sidles over to him, reaching out to put an arm around his shoulders. Meeting no resistance, he tugs him closer and feels Bucky lean against his side. He stays like that for a little while, giving them both a chance to recover from the stress of the encounter.

“So,” he says at last.

Bucky shifts his weight off of Steve's side, but doesn't pull away. “So that was Kita.”

Steve knows “Nemesis” is a codename, but “Kita” sounds like a personal address, a nickname. He bristles at the implications. “And she's been here the whole time?”

Bucky nods, chin knocking against Steve's shoulder. “Hey.”

“Hmm?” Steve turns to get a better look at his friend.

“Could you maybe hold off killing her for a while?” Bucky asks, already starting to sound more like himself again.

“Yeah?”

“'Cause I've got some stuff to sort out with her.”

“Okay.” Steve's still pretty well lost about what things are like between Bucky and Kita, and he's a bit relieved that Bucky doesn't seem a whole lot clearer on the matter.

Steve doesn't stick around a whole lot longer after that. He knows it's all been a huge effort for Bucky, and his friend needs some time to himself, that he’s reached his dealing-with-people limit for the day.

As he leaves the apartment, Steve notices a long white chalk line with a number of short cross-marks on the ground near the wall, and a pile of crushed glass glinting like stars near the curb. He can't see any sign of the cotton string, but he's sure it's somewhere.

He remembers what Kita said, back when they first met.  _ There are entire manuals of protocol. You don't know it _ . But Bucky knows. Speaking Russian, hand signs, whistles, and now this arcane arrangement of ordinary objects; she and Bucky are still communicating in ways that he has no access to.

It's not that he doesn't trust Bucky, he tells himself. It's just that she could tell him  _ anything _ . She could tell him something that could hurt him, or put someone in danger. And no matter what his intentions, Bucky might not be  _ able _ to pass the information on to Steve. Not yet. Even now, not yet.

And then another thought strikes him. These signs are visual. Which means that wherever Kita is, she has a line of sight on Bucky's apartment. It means she's watching Steve right now. He scans the area is inconspicuously as he can, but he sees no sign of her.

Steve doesn't like this. He  _ really _ doesn't like this. But there's no clear line of action, and he reminds himself that it's not the situation that's new, just his being aware of it. He has time, he can do this properly, can gather the information he needs instead of rushing in blind. He puts the concern on hold and heads out.

Over the next few weeks, Steve finds that although he doesn't trust Kita, or even, to a certain degree, approve of tolerating her presence as Bucky has asked him to do, he does have one thing in common with her-- the understanding that Bucky does not need to deal with ordinary inconveniences right now. Between the two of them, they manage to keep him fed, the apartment clean, the laundry washed, and the kitchen stocked. He can't tell whether she's doing it out of attrition, or genuine concern, or something else altogether, but it becomes a kind of truce between them.

They never speak to one another, but their efforts end up very well synchronized. Steve never comes over to find that Kita's done what he was going to do, but most of the time, when he isn't able to get around to something, he finds that she's taken care of it. Witnessing Kita's domestic habits second-hand, it strikes Steve that she must live somewhat like a bachelor. Her housekeeping has a utilitarian, even military quality that fails spectacularly to embody the concept of “a woman's touch,” and in food, she tends to favor simple preparations and hunks of meat or takeout. She seems especially partial to Chinese takeout, as he sees the distinctive containers with regular frequency.

When he asks about it, Bucky grins. “She'll never admit it. Capitalist decadence undermining the resolve of the cause and all that.”

This catches Steve off-guard. “Wait,” he says. “You mean she's actually a Communist?”  He had been in the habit of thinking of her as nothing more than a willing pawn of HYDRA.

“Yeah...” Bucky trails off.

Steve and Kita's visits never coincide. It's unintentional on Steve's part, but he doesn't know how much effort Kita might be putting into avoiding him. The most he sees of her is a brief glimpse through the window as he's coming up

It strikes Steve that they look like a pair of immigrants, sitting across the kitchen table from each other, drinking coffee from chipped mugs and speaking a language he doesn't know. Immigrants. Is that what they are? Is that what all this has made them? He files away the twinge of surprise and loss for later examination, possibly for bringing up with Sam.

One day, Steve's heading into the kitchen when he sees a photo on the fridge, crammed in with all his notes. The photo looks recent, the technique modern, though it's a bit difficult to tell, since it's almost devoid of color. The picture is of a snowy field, dotted with smoky copses of leafless trees. There is a dark line of woods rising in the middle distance, and the faint outline of mountains hover above them, against the muddy grey of the clouded sky.

“I thought you didn't like photos.”

Bucky, who's come up behind Steve, follows his gaze over his shoulder to the picture on the fridge. “You know this is different.”

Steve knows that, knows that the issues Bucky has with certain photos has to do with a quality of memory. But he's pretty sure he knows what this is a picture of. That Kita would bring Bucky a photo like this, and that Bucky would hold onto it, leaves something hard and twisting in the pit of Steve's stomach.

He feels Bucky run a hand over the contours of his back. It's the left hand, the touch of cold metal. Bucky knows he's struggling to accept this, voices the ugly, terrible truth that Steve has stumbled upon, puts it into words for him.

“Not all of the memories there are bad,” he says softly.

 


	5. 2:17am

> "My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
> 
> For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
> 
> The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
> 
> The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
> 
> O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
> 
> Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes."

- _King James Version_ , Song of Solomon 2:10-15

 

When he heard a car pull up outside, he looked out the window to see Kita climbing out of her worn-out burgundy sedan.  He hadn’t seen the car in a while, she usually leaves it around the corner or so out of habit, but he remembered it from when they were running.  She got it early on, when they could get away with expenses like that, at a used car lot-- it might be stolen, but she’s not the one who stole it.

By the time he opened the door, she was leaning against the side of the car casually, arms crossed over her chest and a cocky half-smile playing around the corner of her mouth.

“You coming?” she called over to him.

“Where?”

“Out.”

He grabbed a jacket, less for warmth and more to be sure that his left arm stayed hidden, and locked the door as he left.  Kita was waiting behind the wheel when he got there, and he slid into the passenger seat beside her.  As they pulled away, he looked over to see whether she felt like elaborating on the topic of where the hell they were going, but she didn’t seem to.

They have been driving a while, now, and he takes a closer look out the window.  The sun has begun to sink towards the horizon, firmly to their left.  They are headed north, and have probably been doing so consistently since they set out.  They have passed out of the city and its surrounding area, and are driving now through farmlands dotted with planned housing developments.

Driving like this, looking over at her beside him and seeing something hovering around the edges of the proud lines of her profile, something hard and bright and secret, something that’s been missing for a long time now, it reminds him of when they were running, the two of them, hunted by pretty much everyone-- holding out, waiting, hoping Kita’s plan to reach the figure picked from the broken pieces of his past would pan out.  Because if it didn’t, well, they couldn’t keep running forever.

There is a sense of calm in being around her, and he doesn’t like it.  He has learned to ignore the voice of his training, the constant needling compulsion, to know that it is not  _ him _ .  But its absence in her presence is unsettling, feeding into his worst suspicions about her.

Though he still benefits from the ceasefire.

He wants someone to tell him that everything is okay, that it’s over, that no one will harm him ever again.  He wants this to be true.  But it isn’t.

The day before, they had gone back to the medical facility-- him and Steve and Steve’s friend Sam Wilson in Sam’s car-- and he found himself wishing Kita were there.  Not necessarily her, not her in particular, but someone more inclined to outwardly express distrust in a bureaucratic system.  It isn’t because Steve doesn’t see the faults- Bucky knows they’re equally unhappy about the situation- but Steve’s way of dealing with it is to be pleasant and smile until he doesn’t.  Which left Bucky scowling alone.

He’s still trying to figure out who runs that place, how it fits in with the larger picture.  He knows it isn’t a normal Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center, what with the superficial attempts to disguise the location’s true nature- from the outside, it looks like an affluent office complex, maybe a private medical clinic.  But it isn’t.

He remembers Steve telling him about how they wanted to send him to Los Alamos during the war, after Erskine died.  He wonders if this place is like that, the new secret research facility, hidden in plain view.  Has the system become so decentralized that there is a place like this near every major city, or does the D.C. area have an especially high concentration of subjects?

Or maybe that place is like a VA Medical Center for intelligence workers.  People whose injuries and ailments might be better kept hidden from the public eye.  For the sake of security.  For the sake of peace.

Do they perform medical experiments there?  He saw nothing, heard nothing to confirm this suspicion.  The hallways are always clean, bright, the staff uniformly mildly pleasant-mannered, the equipment kept neatly in place.  But this is no assurance.  If they did something to him, something more than the endless routine of exams and monitoring, they might not tell him.  He might not know.

Whispers about that sort of thing-- drugs and radiation and biological agents-- spread even back in his day, back during the war.  Some have since been confirmed.  Some are still denied.  Some have been forgotten.  Even Steve-- how much did they really tell him before the procedure?  How certain were they that it wouldn’t go wrong?  Wouldn’t kill him, either on the spot or years later?

There were Conscientious Objectors during the war.   _ Cowards _ , people called them.  He remembers a face, nothing else, just a face.  Eyes wide, skin sallow and drawn, the faint lines of anger-- anger deferred.  It was not the face of a coward.  It was the face of a dying man, a man who had been betrayed.  But it is difficult for him to hold this image separate, to keep it from bleeding into other images.  Prisoners, victims-- has he looked like this, too?

It is late in the season, and the fields lie empty and dark, all but the last winter crops already harvested and brought in.  Along the side of the road, tall grass has begun to fall over itself, going damp and brown.  A small flock of birds flies low over the horizon, their bodies black against the sky.

He has not felt hemmed in or constricted living in the city.  Nor has he noticed any stress from the constant proximity to so many people.  Yet something within him is unraveling at the sight of the landscape spread open and empty around them.

He has been doing better now, with the panic.  He can keep a hold on it.  He can force it down, when it threatens to overwhelm him.  Nothing snapped him back into the horrors of the past during that latest visit, not like the blood pressure cuff on his arm did that first time.

Steve was there to help him hang on.  To lead him through it, with light touches and whispered cues.  To be another pair of eyes watching, keen, for anything that might be awry.  Something could be terribly wrong, and there is nothing they can do.  And the uncertainty of it, and the wrongness, is eating away at him.  At both of them, really, but he is closer to the edge.

Back at the medical facility, while they had been sitting in one room, waiting to be called into another, he had asked, in a hushed voice, “I’m not crazy, am I?”

“No, Bucky,  _ no _ !”  Steve sounded pained.  “You’re tuned finer, to pick up on certain things.  But you’re not wrong.”

“Thanks.”  Bucky leaned against his friend’s shoulder, eyes closed.

“Idiot,” Steve murmured into his hair.

“Punk.”

He and Kita pass New York at nightfall, skirting wide around the city to avoid traffic.  The orange-violet light of the sunset on one horizon is matched by the amber glow of the city on the other.  Seeing the hue of the light, he imagines that if he were to go back, he would step into a sepia-toned past, that everything would be as it had been, and that in doing so, he would be transformed, would go back to being just a kid from Brooklyn.

The idea is disorienting, like staring down a long shaft.  It seems so much like what he should want, yet something about it is ill-fitting.  He is relieved when the glow of the city fades away behind them, and glad that they do not go any nearer.  Night deepens and they are still driving.

Steve comes back with him, after the trips to the medical facility, and stays the night. _  What will people think? _  Neither of them ask, but the question is still there. Steve explained, the first time, that people are less likely to care, now, and less likely to say or do anything even if they do care. But he’s given up on what people will think, if they will notice.

At night, the horror of it, the outrage, revisits him.  He loses control, gives in to the fits of hysteria that wrack him.  And Steve is there.  Someone to struggle against.  Someone to cling to.  Someone to hear him scream, hear him sob.  Someone to watch him break and, in a lesser way, to break with him.

These are not nightmares the way he usually has nightmares.  They are not some particularly cruel outgrowth of the dark and twisting architecture of his dreams.  True, they are unleashed with sleep, but they are the specters of his waking life.  This is the price he pays for staying calm, for holding back during his trips to the medical facility.

The crunch of car wheels on unpaved road signals that they are nearing their destination.  Outside the window, all is dark aside from the two ragged streaks illuminated by the headlights.  The pale beams of the headlights jump and skitter over the gravel road, and the woodlands to either side.  The only lights inside the car are the dim backlit gauges on the dash and the flickering green numbers of the clock.  They read 7:24, though he has no reason to believe that Kita would bother to make sure the time is right.

Kita pulls the car over to the side of the road.  She kills the engine and the lights vanish.  Neither of them move at first, until they adjust to the darkness.  It is a clear night, the moon overhead slim but bright silver-white.

When he opens the door, the air is bitter cold.  And when he gets out, the ground is covered with leaves and dusted with snow, sloping gently towards what might be a mountain peak in the distance.  Across from him, Kita opens her door, and slams it closed.

He does not have to ask where she has brought him or what they are doing here.  They are  _ out _ .   There is an expectant quality to their movements, the way they feel out the edges of each movement and roll through.  And now, he is off, breaking into an easy jog, holding off on the pace in deference to the dark and the unfamiliar location.  Kita follows suit, doing well enough at keeping up, tailing him.

He remembers this.  Remembers running.  The times when everything felt like night and he followed her, leaping into the soft-furred throat of winter, abandoning all sense of being but the feral rush of bounding through a field white with snow, streaking between copses of ghostly trees and running through a dark wood.  Endorphins running in his veins, nerves singing.  Two animals, nothing more.

The forest here is different-- smooth straight tree trunks with very little undergrowth.  The ground slopes upwards, the rocky bones of the earth showing through in places and the lowland woods giving way to dense evergreens further up.

When dawn fills the sky with flat grey light, they head out, back to the car on the side of the road.  They move separately, out of sight of one another.  He takes a rambling, indirect route, following the damp folds of the mountain down to forested valleys before looping back along the crests of ridges, then back again.

Steve left in the morning.  He offered to stay longer, but Bucky shrugged the offer off.  The night was over, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a second cup of coffee and watching the way the light moves around the space.  He wondered what he was going to do with the day.  He has been finding himself wondering this more often lately, and he generally finds that the answer is that he will work away at the time like a wolf at a bone until it is gone and night has come.

His gaze landed upon the lone photograph stuck to the fridge amid the sea of yellow post-its.  Kita brought it because it is a place they had both known well, a place they had escaped to, had been better to one another, a place they had run through, mindless as beasts.  But even she, who knows the worst of him (almost), does not understand the full significance of this photo.

In it, there is a field, white with snow.  Here and there, it is dotted with smokey copses of trees.  A dark line of woods along the edge of the field, and beyond, the pale grey outline of mountains against a grey sky.

The field is a graveyard.  Six or seven unmarked graves- he cannot pick apart the fragments of memory well enough to know which. He should be the one testament to their lives, the one person who holds on to their names and the knowledge that they existed, but he cannot, and the regret that he feels at not knowing, the guilt, will not change that.

He always thinks of the graves as shallow.  Shallow graves.  Even though he knows they are all a full six feet deep.

He killed them, the  _ things that did not hurt _ .  He killed each of them.  He knows why he killed them: they had outlived their function, and had tried, one way or another, to release both him and themselves.  He remembers a blurred amalgamation of faces, leaning over him, stained with tears, or frightened, or hardened with resolve, but above all, filled with pain and compassion.  Whispered apologies.  Hands clutching knives or guns.  Wishing that they would succeed, but they never did.  They always underestimated how disposable they really were.

In seventy years, they were, by nature of their assigned role,  the only people who really saw him as something more than a machine, a weapon, a tool, a means to an end.  And he killed them.  He remembers launching into the assaults, conditioned command blazing behind him, pushing him onward.  And he wanted to do it, he  _ himself _ .  A part of him cried out in assent, angry at their failure to kill him and the years of quiet betrayal inherent in the post they shared, the post that was last filled by Kita.

Kita is waiting for him by the car when he gets there, the same way she was waiting that morning, when the sound of her arrival had pulled him from the reverie he had fallen into after Steve’s departure.  She leans against the vehicle, not-quite-grinning at him.  As soon as he gets within range, she throws a plastic bottle of water at him, and he snatches it effortlessly out of the air, opens it, and takes a swig.  It’s cold, with slivers of ice from sitting in the car all night.

The car itself is likewise chilled, but as they pull away, heading back out of the forest and south towards D.C., Kita turns on the faltering air system only to keep the windows clear enough to see the road and aside from that, they endure the cold.  He sleeps through most of the ride.  In particular, he tries, successfully, not to notice when they pass by New York.

He is awake as they reach their destination, because that is a part of the habit of sleeping when and where he can.  And he knows that Steve will be there, waiting by the apartment door, well before they pull up and see that he is, in fact, standing there, wearing that grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

Kita parks the car and gets out.  He does likewise, despite a sense of foreboding.

“Where on earth have you been?” Steve demands, and he is not running, but walking-- no,  _ marching _ \-- towards them and stops just in front of Kita, for a second he thinks Steve’s going to grab her and shove her up against the side of the car, but he doesn’t.

Her jaw is set, shoulders stiff, braced.  “Out.”  Her forced tone matches her posture.

It hasn’t been like this for a while, he’s been able to keep track of what people are saying even if he hasn’t responded, but as the two of them start to yell at one another, he slips away from the words.  He catches guilty, apologetic looks from both of them, and he senses that the fight would be a lot worse if he weren’t there, but neither of them can manage to  _ stop _ \--

The silence in his head has different textures.  The numbing calm he feels around Kita.  The rough-edged wilderness of  _ running _ .  And now, the flooding static of incomprehensible words.  This is his, this is  _ him _ , and he finds bitter pride in the strangeness of it.

Kita was the one who broke off yelling.

“Save the debriefing,” she said to Steve.

To him, she said, “До свидания, Волчонок.” 

_ See you later, volchonok _ .

Then she got back in the car and pulled away, leaving him and Steve standing there.

Steve put his hands on his hips and then dropped them helplessly at his sides, looking at Bucky and then away again, concern and shame battling for prominence in his expression.

Bucky does not care which one of them screwed up worse, he does not want to have a contrition-off with Steve Rogers, he just wants things between them to be fixed, put back in the unstable order they have been in.  He grabbed a handful of grey sweatshirt and pulled Steve into the apartment and held on because he knows, right now, that he can’t let Steve leave.

They each wrestle with the silence for a while.  Bucky wishes that they could just beat the heck out of each other, it would be an easier way to start.  Then Steve, probably because he knows it’s what he should have done in the first place, asks, “Are you okay?”

Bucky sighs, nods.  “Yeah,” he says, pleasantly surprised by the evenness of his own voice.  He takes a deep breath and uncurls his fingers from the lump of sweatshirt in his hand.  “We went out.”

He sees the way Steve tries not to scowl at Bucky’s echo of Kita’s “out,” a crease forming between his brows.

“To the woods,” he clarifies, “north of here.”

But north of this neighborhood is another neighborhood very much like it, and Bucky can tell from the look on Steve’s face that he’s confused, trying to fit “woods” into a map of the general area.

“A lot north.  We passed New York, it was maybe halfway.”

“Was that a safe move?” Steve asks, effectively hiding any surprise he might feel.

“Well, if we’d run into a bear, it would’ve been in more danger than us.”

This gets a rueful chuckle from Steve and leaves at least one glaring threat to Bucky’s well-being unaccounted for.

“Look, Steve, about Kita--”

Before he can continue, Steve nudges him towards the couch.  He’s reluctant to stop, reluctant to face the idea that they’re going to sit down and have a serious talk, but he  _ likes _ the couch, he tells himself, and it’s  _ Steve _ , and even if they’ve just gone over a rough patch, it’s  _ still _ Steve.  So he takes the time settling in to put things in order, figure out what to say.

“I know you don’t trust her.  That’s fine.  You can go on being angry at her for me, I just--”

Bucky falters, losing the rhythm of it, and lapses into silence.  Steve doesn’t prompt him, or nod encouragingly, or even look concerned or expectant, at least not more than he usually does.  Steve is getting good at waiting out these silences.   _ The way _ , he thinks, _ that Kita has always been good at it _ .

“I just want you to know why I’m not.”

“Okay.”  Steve’s voice is calm, patient.

“Before, when we were kids,” he’s digging deep, now, pulling up things he never said, even then, “I remember other guys used to ask me why I let some sick, skinny kid hang around me.  And I’d punch ‘em in the face, of course.”

They exchange a look, Steve wearing a complicated grin.

“But it bugged me, at first, because I couldn’t figure it out.  I knew they were wrong about you, knew they were missing everything important, but I couldn’t say what that was.”

He lets himself stop for a while, this time intentionally.

“Thing is, see, I remember I always knew the world was shit, ‘cause of how it treated  _ you _ .”

His voice cracks, finally, under the spill of memories he unleashes by saying this.  He has been hungry for memories, starving for them.  He has hunted them, chased them down the dark depths.  But now, he does not have time to sift through them.  He puts them aside, tells himself,  _ later _ , even though they might not be there later.  He has to finish this.

“But you,” he starts again, faltering, “you had something  _ better _ .  Something you wanted, something you believed in.  Shone out of you like a light.  I followed you, ‘cause I wanted to see where you could go with it.”

_ Even though _ , he tries to hold the memory back, but can’t,  _ even though I always thought you’d die before you got very far _ .

“And,” he pushes on, “if I could, I wanted to help you get there.”

Having gotten through most of what he wants to say, he finally looks over at Steve, and Steve looks like, well,  _ Steve _ , which is to say that he looks as if he’s taken it seriously, and listened, and paid attention, even to the weird little quirks that not even Bucky quite got, and he’s the one who said them, and that he’s going to think about all this and maybe have something to say about it at some unknown time in the future.

Looking at Steve, a part of him wants to qualify what he is about to say, to soften it and erase any hint of disloyalty in it, but he knows that would be too dishonest, and can only give the weakest preface.

“And even if it’s exactly what HYDRA wanted,” he says, regretting every word of it, “sometimes, Kita reminds me of you.”

 


	6. 3:45am

 

> "When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work _cannot_ say becomes important.  In the semiosis of the social text, elaborations of the insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance.’  The sender-- ‘the peasant’ -- is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness... The historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge,’ is only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act.  With no possibility of nostalgia for the lost origin [of the text of insurgency], the historian must suspend (as far as is possible) the clamor of his or her own consciousness... so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an ‘object for investigation,’ or, worse yet, a model for imitation.  ‘The subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant group."

-Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

 

The next time Kita goes to see Barnes, he looks even more displeased than usual.

“You’re avoiding him.  Steve, I mean,” he says when he meets her at the door.

She doesn’t deny the accusation-- no point lying when it’s out in the open-- but shoots back, “I don’t want to start a fight.”

“Then don’t.”

“What, did you invite him over?”

Barnes’ silence functions as confirmation.

“Tch.”  Kita grits her teeth.  “Fine.”

He turns and heads into the apartment and she follows.  Rogers is on his way, and she still doesn’t want to face him, but she doesn’t have it in her to put up a fight.

She is undeterred by Barnes’ lack of courtesy, and well aware that her lack of concern about things like this is the only reason he doesn’t do more to keep her at arm’s length.  He leads her into the kitchen, and they seat themselves across the table from one another.  Already, this is becoming a routine, down to the way he pushes a chipped mug over to her.

“Funny,” he says, “I just can’t seem to get the coffee right.”

She takes a drink.  “There’s nothing wrong with this,” she says.

“Yeah, that’s the problem.  Doesn’t taste nearly enough like Stalin’s asshole.”

She grins.  “Maybe it’s the water.  You tried adding a few drops of industrial runoff before brewing?”

“You think?”

She shrugs.  “Couldn’t hurt.”

That’s as far as they get, though, before falling silent.

She doesn’t know which one of them is aware of Rogers’ imminent arrival first, but they both pick up on it.

“Your better half’s here,” she says, though he’s still maybe a quarter of a mile away.

Barnes fixes her with a sharp look, clearly an admonition not to try and vanish, and she takes a drink of her coffee with feigned innocence.   _Look, see?  Not going anywhere._  He doesn’t actually snicker or roll his eyes, because he’s not actually a teenage girl, but there’s something of the intent there, in the angle of his jaw as he gets up, or the particular way he turns away from her on his way over to meet Rogers at the door.

She stays where she is, sitting in the kitchen, and gazes out of the window with an air of boredom, once she’s sure that Rogers will be out of sight from her vantage point.  They can go be uncomplicated to each other, without her getting in the way.  She’ll wait here.

When they come back to the kitchen, Barnes in the lead again, Rogers stops in the doorway and stares at her.  He knows better than to draw attention to his surprise, though.  She returns the look, cold and steady.

Barnes stands back, watching the two of them with his arms crossed over his chest.  One eyebrow is raised in sardonic half-expectation.  Like, _well, I’m not going to stop you._

Kita’s tempted, actually, by the sheer lack of effort to prevent a fight.  She could be up in an instant, take a swing at Roger’s jaw, go at it all barroom-brawl style.  She wouldn’t win, of course, he’s Captain America, he could wipe the fucking floor with her, but if Barnes didn’t want her to burn her hand off, he shouldn’t have put the giant “DO NOT PUSH” button with the flesh-melting laser over it right out there in the open where she could get at it.

Rogers saves her the trouble by breaking first, taking the high road, of course.  He pastes an almost-believable smile on his face and steps towards her, right hand held out.

“Steve Rogers,” he says.  “I don’t think we’ve really been introduced.”

“We haven’t.”  She shakes his hand, though.  Only so far you can go without at least pretending to be polite.

Barnes ambles over, now that the air has been cleared and there’s no imminent possibility of a fight.  He gives Rogers a cup of coffee-- puts it directly in his hands, actually, though neither of them so much as hesitate or make note of the gesture.  They don’t even make eye contact in the process.  It’s just automatic.

Kita doesn’t want to sound like she’s holding back, so she tries introducing a topic of conversation that they all have some investment in.  “You know HYDRA’s still out there, right?”

Rogers scowls, and Barnes does his best impression of a brick wall.

“Any idea what kind of threat they pose?”  This is Rogers.  Barnes isn’t going to be hitting the beats of a normally-paced conversation for a while.  Her fault, she supposes, but fuck it.

“They took a heavy blow, and they’re still recovering.  Probably not big on field operations.  Don’t know what their political branch looks like, I’d expect that for their next attack.”

“You really don’t know anything else?”

Kita glares back at Rogers.  Of course she has more information.  She knows the location, the layout, the defense specs of an entire facility.  But she’s not going to give it to him--  she’s sure there are others like her, others who have no idea who they’re really working for, and if she gives Rogers the information, he’ll be obliged to storm in and kill everyone.

“I didn’t know who I was working for,” she tells him.  “I have no knowledge of HYDRA’s organizational layout.”

She can feel him evaluating her, weighing the uncertain danger she presents against whatever force has stayed his hand so far.  She is not their ally, not their friend.   _Deal with it, assholes_ , she thinks.

Raising her coffee cup, she finds it empty.  This, she decides, is a good enough signal that she can be done with this little get-together that Barnes has been so keen on.  She gets up, washes the cup out in the sink, and leaves it upside-down in the yellowing wire dish rack to dry.

“ _До свидания_ , _Волчонок,_ ” she says-- _see you later, volchonok_ \-- and leaves.

* * *

It is not a week later, and Kita is considering Orpheus and Eurydice.  And why shouldn’t she?  After all, she is well versed in Classics.  It’s one of the supreme ironies of her life that her training should be an absurd dichotomy.  On the one hand, she is a brutal killer, heir to the long legacy of dreaded Soviet assassins.  And on the other, she has the education and fine layer of bearing to pass as a wealthy socialite when doing so allows her access to her targets.  Has allowed her access-- she has no targets now, and the future is uncertain.  She is as expert in her violent trade as she is at impersonating the targets of that violence.

For instance, she has trained, in identically artificial circumstances and by similarly repetitious methods, to wield a knife and apply cosmetics. Both are potentially crucial to her success during an operation and neither are especially pertinent otherwise.

And so she is considering Orpheus and Eurydice.

The story has always struck her as being so _unfair_.  Did Orpheus really have any way to know that, by looking back when he had crossed the threshold but his beloved had not, he would lose her forever?  Had Persephone been unclear on purpose, just to screw him over?

It strikes her that she might very well be said to be living out her own iteration of the myth.  She recalls that late-night exchange over a pre-paid cell phone.   _A song that moved even stones to tears_.  That makes her, what?  Persephone?

_But you never looked back.  You climbed the steps, crossed the river, marched halfway across a mythical landscape, and you still haven’t looked back.  You’ve never had to look back, you trust him._

Was that it?  Orpheus’ tragic flaw?  Trust?  If he’d only trusted Eurydice it wouldn’t have mattered whether the instructions were clear, because he never would’ve had to have been told.

And what of the stories where Eurydice is sent back to Hades by her own actions?  Where Orpheus is prompted to look back when she speaks?

Is that why Kita feels as if she is the one crossing the river?  She is standing there, with the cold waters of the Styx swirling around her ankles.   _Look back at me, dammit!_  she wills.   _Look back and show me that you’re trying._  But he doesn’t.

A noise jolts her from her contemplation.  She swears silently and listens.  The paces are careful, measured.  Someone is looking for her.

She moves quickly and quietly.  She checks her knives and chooses a sidearm better suited to close range than the big rifle set up by the window, tucks extra ammo into easy-to-reach pockets and pouches.

Her position-- the vantage point--is too weak to an approach from the door.  As the intruder ascends the stairs to the hallway outside, she crosses the room, steps inaudible, and waits, breath stilled and gun ready.

The footsteps outside don’t hesitate even for a moment, and grow louder and faster an instant before the door slams open and she leaps forward--

“What the fuck, Rogers!”

It is only a lifetime’s worth of physical training that allows her to pull up short, gun still held out in front of her, without an undignified lurch.

“No, really, what the fuck!”

All the tension of preparation flows neatly into anger, and she makes no attempt to reign it in.

“Do you want to get us all fucking killed!”

He doesn’t answer, so she keeps going.

“Do you even know how many bugs you brought in here?  How many tracking devices?  Do you have any idea where your tail is?  Because you always have one, always, trust me, I’ve been watching them.”

Rogers looks more perturbed than chastised, but she’s right, she knows she is.  If HYDRA was nursing any hope of a physical assault, Rogers leading them to her hideout could be the opening that makes that possible.  She knows that she doesn’t have his trust, and she doesn’t expect to, but if he was so worried about her keeping an eye on things, he should have said something at Barnes’ Coffee Klatch and Social Hour.

If, she realizes, she hadn’t been so resistant to the whole idea, so abrupt and uncommunicative.  She exhales slowly, putting the safety back on the gun she has been pointing at Rogers and tucking it into a holster at her hip.

“So,” he says, eyeing the room behind her, “Have you been living here?”

“What do you care?”

His mouth turns down in a little frown of concern.  She can’t believe it.  Is Steve Rogers-- Captain America and her _sworn goddamn enemy_ \-- worried about her squatting in a shabby little room in a half-vacant building in a disreputable neighborhood?  She knows that he thinks of a decadent Western lifestyle as “normal,” but for her, a hot plate and a bedroll are about par for the course when it comes to amenities.

In many ways, this offers more physical comfort than she is used to.  Growing up, she frequently snuck out at nights to curl up next to the cryostatic chamber.  Here, she does not have to contend with the cold leaking from the hulking dark structure, or the pervasive damp.  Sometimes she misses it.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“Why are you here?”

She nods towards the window, the vantage point.  “Keep an eye on things.  Wait.  Kill any HYDRA agents who poke their heads up.”

He flinches at the last one.  What does he think she’s going to do, sit them down for a tea party?

“Look, if you’re wondering about me and HYDRA, they lied to me, they betrayed me, and I’m more than willing to make them pay for it.”

She can tell he has more questions about that, but she doesn’t want to answer them, so she keeps talking.

“If anyone else gets the brilliant idea to go after him, I won’t stand around and do nothing.  But he’s under US custody.  No one’s going to challenge that.”

He tilts his head and looks at her kind of sideways.  “No one?”

“Off the top of my head?  No one.”

She can come up with a few organizations that might challenge US custody, people she’s worked with in the past, providing that they aren’t also fronts for HYDRA, but she can’t imagine the Winter Soldier being a huge priority for them unless, again, they’re HYDRA.  But this is exactly the sort of thing she doesn’t want to tell Rogers.

Whatever he thinks of what she’s told him, he manages not to make any sign, just nods sort of non-committally.  “If anything happens, just let me know, would you?”

“Got it.”  Her natural suspicion doesn’t extend so far that she’ll refuse backup in a fight.

He reaches for his phone, but she reminds him, “Already have your number.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah, you do.”  He looks... not puzzled, exactly, but it’s clear he hadn’t been keeping that phone call in mind.

She turns back to the vantage point, making sure that everything’s all right, and letting Rogers show himself out.

* * *

The call comes at an odd hour.  Isn’t it always the way of tyrants, to have their agents turn up late at night?  She glances at the time and thinks, _Congratulations, assholes, you can read an international time zone chart_.

She takes the call and answers promptly.  “ _Доброе утро_ .” _Good morning_.

The voice on the other end of the line answers, as she knows it will, in Russian.  “ _The code you want, the one that will be your death, it is_ \--”

What follows is a series of syllables, which only sounds Russian because it was created by Russian speakers.  It is not words.  It would not occur in normal speech.  It would be very hard to say this sequence by accident.

Kita hangs up abruptly.

She has known how she was going to die since she was fourteen, coming back from her first solo mission, still a thin wisp of a girl, honed down to her barest, brightest core.  Petrovitch had taken her by the shoulder, drawing her into a huddle of people she knew but rarely spoke to, who were acting as though this gathering were not in her honor, though there was no other purpose for it.

Petrovitch had offered her a mug with a finger’s depth of vodka in it and she had taken it.  It had tasted cold, medicinal.

“ _Today_ ,” he said, “ _you truly become our comrade_.”

The others had nodded.

Irina, who did paperwork, hung back.  When the others had gotten drunk enough, she had pulled Kita aside, and told the girl exactly how she was going to die, one day.  Kita wasn’t supposed to know.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” Irina had said, smiling softly, as if in consolation.  “ _It’s just part of your job._ ”

Two days later, Kita had been officially introduced to the Winter Soldier.

She closes her eyes, sighing.

_If anything happens, just let me know, would you?_

She should call, she really should.

But calling means telling Rogers about the codes.  It means telling him about knowing how she will die.  Telling him that she still knows that this is how she will die, now that she has the code.

She lets her hand fall.  She can’t do it.  She just can’t.


	7. 4:26am

> Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-construction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

-Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”

 

 

Even though she agreed to tell him if anything happened, Steve hears about Kita’s disappearance from everyone but her.  Not long after she made the promise, Bucky tells him she’s gone, and he’s not quite sure what that means, but it sounds permanent.  A few weeks later, however, Natasha calls to tell him that someone matching the vague description of a HYDRA operative, codenamed Nemesis, might be trying to smuggle contraband into the country.

He considers for a moment, then says, “Just let her through.  I’ve got it under control.”

“Really?  ‘Cause it sounds like what you’ve got is a problem.”

“If it turns into a problem, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I’d say you trust people too much, but you know?  It seems to work out for you,” Nat pauses significantly, “ _ most _ of the time.”

Steve hasn’t been keeping Natasha posted about the situation, but then, he’s not sure he has to.  She was the one who called him when Bucky had been gone for more than 24 hours, and now she’s the one who’s calling him about Nemesis.

“Look,” he says, “Nemesis isn’t HYDRA.”

“You sure about that?  I know her, Steve.  I know what she’s done.”

He isn’t sure, not really, and he isn’t sure that it matters what he thinks-- having Kita apprehended might be the right thing to do, regardless.  But so far as he knows, Bucky’s request that she not be killed is still in effect, and he supposes that includes being taken into federal custody.

“I wouldn’t trust her, no, but I want to move carefully on this.”

“Your call, Captain.”

The line goes dead before Steve has a chance to respond, not that he has a response prepared.

A few days later, Bucky calls to tell him that Kita’s on her way over.  He doesn’t follow this up with a request, but Steve can tell what he’s not saying.

“You want me to head over there?”

A pause, longer than usual.  “Yeah.”

Then a click, as Bucky hangs up.

Steve is out of the apartment like someone’s called an emergency.  On the way out, he nearly runs into his neighbor with the dark glasses and messy hair.  He calls an apology over his shoulder as he rushes down the stairs.

He isn’t breathing hard when he gets to Bucky’s door, but that’s only because he doesn’t, really, not anymore.  He has to stop himself from pounding on the door, to collect himself before he reaches up to knock.

Kita is the one to open the door.  The wrongness of that strikes him so hard that he launches right into all the things she’s done wrong.  “I never hear a word from you, you disappear, you disappear  _ again _ , I don’t even  _ know _ what you’ve  _ done _ , he never even talks about it, you brought contraband into the country, whatever  _ that _ means.  I want to trust you,” that’s not technically true, but it sounds good, so he rolls with it, “but you’re making that really difficult.”

He cocks his head to the side, as if that will make his point more apparent, but she looks cooly unimpressed.

“Are you done?” she asks.

“Well, unless there’s something I missed.  Wait,” a growing doubt gnaws at the back of his mind, “did you bring the contraband  _ here _ ?  Just, you know, to round things out.  What did you even smuggle in, anyways?”

As if she’s been waiting for the cue, Kita steps to the side of the doorway, and Steve’s attention is drawn to the room beyond.  Bucky is sitting in front of the couch, thankfully unaware or at least pretending to be, and on the floor in front of him is--

On the floor in front of him is a fox.

“His name is Mavrik,” Kita says, following Steve’s line of sight.  “He’s an experimental subject from a research facility near Novosibirsk.  Mavrik is perfectly tame, perfectly harmless, and… no one will be looking for him.”  She wears a mask of aloof professionalism.

“That’s it?” he asks.  “Just a fox?”

“Just a fox.”

“You went all the way to Russia, you alerted who knows what U.S. security agencies on the way back in, and it was all to give him a pet fox?”

The news that her passage hasn’t gone unobserved clearly catches Kita off-guard, but it’s only a twitch of the eye that reveals this.  “Well,” she replies evasively, “smuggling isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”

Back in the apartment, Mavrik noses against Bucky’s hand, insisting on being petted, and the latter murmurs a response in Russian.  Steve wants very much to believe that Kita brought the fox more out of genuine compassion than as a means manipulation-- of provoking him so that she can act like she’s taking the high road with her professional demeanor-- but her attitude says otherwise.  He would feel more ire at a move like this, from her of all people, but the sight of Bucky and Mavrik is so achingly adorable, it leaves little room for anything else.

He walks past Kita into the apartment and kneels down beside them.  “Hey.”

Bucky looks up, and the smile doesn’t reach his mouth, but maybe it’s better that way, more private, no possibility that he’s doing it just for Steve.

“Hey.”  He scratches Mavrik behind the ears.  “This is Mavrik.”

“Yeah?”

Bucky stops scratching and urges the fox towards Steve, encouraging it in Russian.  Mavrik starts towards Steve, then seems to think better of it, and Bucky repeats whatever he said to him.  The fox goes this time, bounding up to Steve with head lowered, bushy tail wagging.

“Hello, Mavrik,” Steve addresses the fox.

He isn’t well-versed in ordinary cats and dogs, much less foxes, but he figures he can’t go wrong with a pat to the back of the shoulders.  As soon as he reaches down to pet Mavrik, however, the fox flops on its side, and Steve settles for a flank, letting the fox’s thick, warm fur envelop his fingers.  He looks back at Bucky.

“Mavrik speaks Russian?”

“He speaks Russian.”

Steve nods, slowly, then decides that he’s monopolized Mavrik’s attention for long enough, and sends the fox back to his owner.  Mavrik complies, and Bucky settles the fox on top of his leg, against his hip, right hand resting across the thick-furred back.

“I should’ve thought of it, Buck, I could’ve got you a dog--”

Steve stops suddenly when Bucky’s expression goes blank and he circles an arm around the fox, twisting his fingers in the animal’s fur until his knuckles go white.  It takes him a while to recover, and Steve waits carefully.

“Not a dog,” he says at last.  “No dogs.”

He supplies no further information, and given the reaction, Steve doesn’t push.  They talk for a while longer, Bucky working his way back to a state that Steve has begun to accept as normal, then past it to a look of moderately contented calm.  Seems like having a pet fox lounging on his lap is doing him good.

Steve turns to ask Kita if she thought to smuggle in any fox food along with the illicit pet, but he finds that she has gone sometime while he was focused on Bucky and Mavrik.  He looks back to Bucky instead.

“You got what you need to take care of a fox?”

“Don’t know the first thing about foxes.”  Bucky looks up with a hint of a grin.

Steve pushes himself to his feet.  “Well then, looks like I have a favor to call in.  And some shopping to do.”

He catches Bucky’s eye and throws him a mock salute on the way out the door.  Once outside, he pulls his phone from inside his coat.

“I looked into that contraband Nemesis was spotted with.”

“Well, hello to you, too.”  Natasha pretends to be put off by Steve’s lack of courtesy, but he can hear the amusement in her voice.

“It’s a fox, named Mavrik.”

Silence from her end.  A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth; he’s thrown her off guard.

“Speaking of which,” he continues, “could you maybe take a minute to give me a primer on the care and keeping of foxes?  It’d save me a trip.”

“Yeah, sure.  Not as if I’ve got anything better to do with my time.”  He can’t quite tell if she’s joking or not.  “But if I do, you’ve got to give me an explanation of why Nemesis is giving you a pet fox.”

“Giving Bucky a pet fox,” he corrects.  “Named Mavrik.  I think I can see my way around to that.”

By the time Steve pulls up in the pet store parking lot, his phone is ringing.  It’s Nat with a list of must-haves.  He jots them down in his notebook.

“I’ve sent you a couple of links, you can look them over when you’re done with errands.  Very informative.  Seems the internet has a soft spot for fox-keeping.”  He can hear the smirk in her voice.

“The internet is a wonderful place.  Now, for what I owe you.”  He gives her a run down of the situation with Bucky, Kita, and the fox, delivering it like a military report to underline the surreal nature of the whole situation.

“Well,” she says at last, “have fun with your menagerie,” and she hangs up.

Steve goes about obtaining the various articles she has deemed essential, and, upon his return to Bucky’s apartment, deposits them on the couch.  Between the two of them, they develop a sort of a system where Bucky takes an item out, Steve repeats what Natasha told him what it was for, and Bucky shows it in turn to Mavrik, presumably repeating Steve’s explanation, though he continues speaking to the fox in Russian.  He could be saying anything, for all Steve knows.  Once finished with this procedure, Bucky settles into playing tug-of-war with Mavrik using a length of knotted rope that Steve has obtained for this very purpose.

Steve notices that Bucky has left a harness and leash in the otherwise empty shopping bag, never touching or even so much as mentioning them.  It could be accidental, and Steve is on the verge of saying something, when it occurs to him that this might very well have been intentional, given the significance of the items.   _ The looser the leash, the longer it reaches _ .  He shudders.  The leash and harness stay in the bag, which Steve wads up and sticks in his jacket.

Bucky lets Mavrik have the rope, and the fox, victorious, breaks away in scurried circuits around the apartment, looping back around to Bucky for attention.  Seeing that his friend is absorbed in the novelty of having a fox, Steve heads into the kitchen to fix the three of them dinner.

_ Happiness _ .  It’s more than Steve was willing to hope for from Bucky.  And he hasn’t seen it, not yet, not really.  But in the other room, playing with Mavrik, that comes close enough that the question of happiness occurs to them.  Could they be happy now after all?  And then his thoughts turn to bygone days, to Brooklyn, before the war.  He remembers smiling then, remembers Bucky smiling then.  But had they been happy?  Or had they been waiting to be able to?

Steve is interrupted in his thoughts by something small and damp swiping across the back of his neck.  He reaches up impulsively to swat it away. 

“What in the--” as he speaks, he turns to see Bucky holding Mavrik, the fox’s muzzle exactly at back-of-the-neck height, and breaks off, indignation long gone.

He’s laughing.  Bucky is laughing.  Not really, not the way he used to.  Just around his eyes, creases that are mere shadows of the way he used to look.  But the expression is honest and unburdened.  It’s not there to cover up worry or pain.  No matter what Kita’s motivation in bringing the fox, Steve feels a pang of gratitude towards her.

Bucky repositions Mavrik, slinging the fox across his shoulders, and stays in the kitchen, watching.  The window has grown dark, and it is as if the world has shrunk to the small kitchen, to the two men and the fox.  When Steve leaves at the end of the evening, the quiet domesticity of that scene is like an extra sweater that he wears on his way home.

But as Steve arrives back at his own apartment, the comfort of the memory vanishes.  He knows the minute he sets foot on the landing that someone has broken in.  There are scratches around the keyhole, and the carpet is too clean.

He considers going to the couple next door, but he hasn’t alerted them to the fact that he knows who they are yet, and he’d rather not do so now.  He proceeds cautiously, alert to any other changes that might signal someone’s presence, or a bomb, or anything else a covert operation might have left behind for him.  But at the same time, he tries to act as if he is unaware, as if he is just going through the normal routine of coming home after a normal day.

He opens the door, stops to take a look in the unlit apartment as he feigns fumbling his keys and picking them up.  Nothing.  He flicks the lights on and takes another look as he removes his jacket and folds it over his arm.  Still nothing, but yes, the floor has been vacuumed since he left.

Moving into the main living area, he sees it.  Propped up in a chair like an unwanted guest, light from the entryway glinting off the refinished surface, white star bold against red and blue rings, the shield-- his shield-- sits prominently in the middle of the room.  The last time he saw it, it was headed straight towards the bottom of the Potomac River as he had thought to himself,  _ I won’t fight you, I’m done _ .  And even though the circumstances have changed, Steve finds that he would rather like to ignore the shield, to go to bed and find it gone in the morning.

First Kita, now the shield; today seems to be the day for the return of things he has been doing just fine without.  After a quick sweep of the rest of the apartment reveals no other alterations, Steve drapes a decorative throw over the shield and decides to give Sam a call.

“You will not believe the day I’ve had,” he begins.

“Yeah?  Try me.”

Steve relays the latest developments to Sam’s patient ear.  They’ve only begun to mull over the events when Steve recalls something he’s been meaning to tell Sam.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve been having these dreams.  It starts out just ordinary.  I’ll be doing whatever you do in dreams, going somewhere, talking to someone, looking for something, and then I turn around and it’s right there.  The Winter Soldier.”

“Like some damn movie monster,” Sam adds.

“Yeah,” Steve echoes, “some damn movie monster.”

Steve no longer believes in the Winter Soldier.  That is, he has become increasingly convinced that the identity was no more than a myth HYDRA created to cover up its imperfect control of their prisoner.  There was no magic mind control device, just torture and lies and someone like Kita to cover up the gaps.

So why does the Winter Soldier stalk Steve’s dreams?

And about a week and a half earlier, not long before Kita left the country, there had been that incident in the kitchen.  Steve had gone over to Bucky’s apartment, and when his knock went unanswered, he let himself in.  He did so because Bucky, usually hyper-vigilant about the space he had claimed as his own, seemed to take a certain pride in allowing Steve this transgression.

Steve had found them in the kitchen.  He was sitting in a chair set in the middle of the floor and she was standing behind him, holding a combat knife mere inches from his throat.  What Steve had seen, in that first moment, was the Winter Soldier and Nemesis.

It was in their posture.  It was in his wide stance and glowering stare; the rigid line of her shoulders, her jaw.  The shock of it swept from his mind all other analysis of the situation, so that it took him a moment to realize that she had the knife out because she was cutting his hair.  And longer still for it to occur to him that some of the disquieting effect of the scene might have come from the way it echoed the two of them as what they had been, as prisoner and keeper.

But it was that first impression that stuck with Steve.

As he ends the call with Sam, Steve feels haunted by the Winter Soldier’s imaginary presence.  He tries to distract himself by perusing the materials Nat has sent him about foxes, but he gravitates towards the breeding project of which Mavrik is a product, and what he learns only makes him more uneasy.

The current predicament of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics-- that it is a Soviet program orphaned at the fall of the USSR and which has now come under the influence of foreign interests-- could very well describe that of the organization that created and directed the Winter Soldier, provided it hadn’t been a HYDRA project from the outset.

And he learns that there is another set of foxes, of which Mavrik is certainly not a member.  Rather than being bred for domesticity, these others, these shadow twins, have been bred for aggressiveness and fear.

Steve gives up on research as a distraction and resigns himself to dreams of pitch black anti-foxes, where the Winter Soldier’s absence is somehow more disturbing than his presence.

The first snowfall of the season comes in the night, and Steve wakes to find the city blanketed in white, detached from its usual context and connotations.  Eager not to revisit the fears of the night before, Steve heads over to check in with Bucky and Mavrik, having made the customary call ahead to be sure that Bucky’s up for company.

Steve has something he’s been keeping in mind since Bucky and Kita went “out” to the Great North Woods.  Calling it a plan seems a little too generous, though it is something that he intends to act upon.  Seeing the snow, he is reminded of this, and decides that now is as good a time as any.

He is not deterred when he arrives to see through the kitchen windows that Kita is already there, sitting in her customary spot by the kitchen table.  She and Bucky are talking, animatedly, and Steve even thinks he sees her laugh.  No reason he can’t just roll with her being there, Steve tells himself, and it’s possible that he owes her a conciliatory gesture, if only to keep the peace.

Bucky meets Steve at the door, with Mavrik, and encourages the fox to greet him, in Russian.  Steve leans down obligingly to pet Mavrik, who snuffles and rolls into his hand enthusiastically.  His duty done, he straightens up to see Bucky looking on with severe approval, but the look dissolves into a conspiratorial half-grin as he meets Steve’s eyes.

Forgoing his usual caution, Steve sweeps Bucky into a close embrace.  He feels the latter tense with alarm, and for a second he’s afraid that he’s made a horrible mistake, until Bucky relaxes, resting his forehead against Steve’s shoulder.

“Punk,” Bucky mutters.  So it’s okay, then.

“Idiot,” Steve responds.

He releases Bucky and ambles after him to the kitchen, where Kita is studiously ignoring him.  She fixes her attention on Bucky and says something to him in Russian.   _ Volchonok _ , maybe.

“You cannot tell him,” she says firmly.  “You absolutely cannot.”

Bucky’s only reply is to stare at her opaquely.

In an attempt to appear unfazed, Steve greets Kita with a nice, casual “Hey,” even throwing in a friendly chin-jut for good measure.  All he gets in return are eye contact and a reluctant nod.

“So, I was thinking,” he says, “we should go for a run.  The three of us, maybe.”

He expects Kita to snort in derision, but she just shrugs.  Bucky doesn’t veto the proposal, either, or give any indication that he’s against it.  It takes a bit more cajoling, but soon all three of them are making preparations.  As they are making sure that Mavrik has been fed, entertained, and is secured in the bedroom, Steve takes advantage of the moment alone with Bucky.

“Hey,” he says, “what was that just now?”

Bucky looks back, uncomprehending.

“With Kita, in the kitchen?  Something you ‘absolutely cannot’ tell me?”

“Oh.”  Bucky glances aside.  “That.”

“Buck, you know I trust you--”  _ if he said it enough times, it would be true _ “--but I can’t trust her.”

“She knows that, you know.  She’s just--”

Steve cannot resist the urge to cross his arms over his chest and sigh.

“She was complaining about borscht, you know, before you got here.  They served it all the time, back in… back at the facility.  It was always terrible.”

“So she’s just baiting me?”

“She really doesn’t want you to know.  Disloyal to the cause.  Doesn’t want you to see that.”

When they rejoin her in the front room, Kita gives no sign that she is aware of their recent exchange.  She has tied back her hair with a utilitarian black hair-tie.  She pulls out another just like it and offers it to Bucky, putting on her best fake Russian accent.

“You see?  Is very good, fashion accessory.  I buy at American store for drugs, very cheap, I can buy many.”

Waving away the hairband, Bucky shoots back, “In Soviet Russia, hair ties buy you at store for drugs.”

Good to see that Bucky’s sense of humor is as terrible as ever.  Steve ushers the two of them out the door before they can come up with any more jokes, and sets out, taking the lead.

Despite the early hour, the streets are already plowed, and only a thin crust of snow remains, punctuated by two darker lines of tire tracks.  The sidewalks are another matter; no one has been out to shovel their walks, and the snow is light and crisp underfoot.

At first, he tries to set a pace that Kita will be able to follow, based off of what someone like Sam might be capable of.  She breaks it.  Either she has no sense of pacing or she just doesn’t care.

Steve tries to match her speed, then, but Bucky keeps pushing him to go faster, brushing up against his elbow like he’s spoiling for a race.

“She won’t mind, you know,” Steve hears from behind his left shoulder.

He looks back and sees that, indeed, Kita is giving little indication of minding, either now or in the future.

“What if she loses sight--”

“C’mon, she’s not exactly helpless.  Or incompetent.”

This is fair enough, Steve thinks, so he accelerates as he rounds the corner and keeps going, faster and faster, laying into his stride.  He’s reaching out towards the rhythm of a solo run, but he doesn’t quite hit it.  Bucky’s fast, but even he’s not as fast as Steve.  After a while, he starts to fall behind, and Steve reins himself in to match.

He has a destination in mind, and he leads them there.  It’s a couple of miles away, but for this group, the distance is no obstacle.  Even Kita manages to stay in sight until the last couple of turns, when the houses melt into light woodlands.  It isn’t whatever forest Kita took Bucky to, but Steve figures that if it’s open space they’re looking for, Potomac Regional Overlook Park is better than nothing.

Not too long after clearing the park boundary, Steve glances back to see Bucky abandon the path.  Checking his own movement, he doubles back and follows, wondering what on earth this could be about.

Where Steve had the upper hand on the flat pavement, over the snowy, uneven ground of the woods, he can’t catch up.  He’s traveled off-road by foot before, yes, but not like Bucky is now.  Not sprinting, recklessly, vaulting over fallen logs and banking off of tree trunks.

Steve hears Kita coming up behind him, but he’s still struck with astonishment when she passes him, her form that same acrobatic almost-parkour that Bucky’s using.  She calls and he responds, high keening cries, wordless, and Steve doesn’t think he’s a part of this anymore, it’s just the two of them, running like--

He tries to stop the thought, but it’s too late.

_ Running like two animals in the snow _ .

Their calls echo between the leafless trees.  He sees them in glimpses, dark against the white ground and the frosted branches.  Kita swinging down from a tree.  Bucky taking an uphill slope on all fours.

Maybe five hundred feet off the road, Steve sees the first blood.  Three small drops dot the ground, bright crimson.  He stumbles, torn for a moment between skidding to a halt and redoubling his pace.  Then he pushes on.

Then there is another, and another.  What on earth are they doing?  Are they hurt?  Are they fighting?

Steve breaks into a paved area, and they’re there, waiting.  He’s leaning against a trash can and she’s crouched at his feet, like a dog.  They certainly look like they’ve been in a fight, sporting an impressive array of early bruises.  Even from a quick glance, Steve can see that she has a cut over her eye, blood and sweat mingling as it drips down her face, and his right palm is seriously skinned.

She grins, showing her teeth.  “In Soviet Russia, workout does you!”

Afterwards, Steve calls Natasha.  “You want to translate something for me?”

“See, I thought we agreed that the internet is a wonderful thing,” she retorts.

“Yeah, well.   _ Volchonok _ .”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“It means a little fox.  Young.  Like, a fox kit.”

Steve hangs up more abruptly than he intends to.

_ How dare she _ .

Bad enough that she should call him by any such nickname at all.  Worse that she should refer to him as an animal, as a  _ little fox _ .


	8. 5:43am

> Of course the military study of emotions does not go beyond what is necessary to an army.  So much in the range of human emotions is forbidden to the well-trained soldier. Even if stoicism fails him momentarily, he is quick to regain his composure.  Does the blast reverberate into heretofore unknown territories in his mind? Might it unlock secret traumas, a child’s terrified weeping, a small and delicate body prey to the overwhelming force of others more powerful than he is?
> 
> The military mind shies clear of a certain kind of knowledge.  Just as in our imagination of public events, we banish what we call private life to the background of our telling, the soldier excludes particular feelings and memories from his idea of who he is.

-Susan Griffin,  _ A Chorus of Stones _

 

 

Of all the schedules he has been held to, as James Barnes, as Bucky, as Sergeant Barnes, as the Winter Soldier, none has been so strict as that kept by his fox, Mavrik.  While there are a couple of clocks around the apartment, he had no use for them before Mavrik and generally ignored them. He’d been doing fine without any routine whatsoever, and so he had continued to put off whatever recalibration was necessary to make clocks relevant to him again.

The fox, whether by habit or by nature, does not share this attitude.  Mavrik expects to be fed twice a day, at exactly the same time every day.  If a meal is so much as a minute late, which barring Steve or Kita’s intervention, it had been at first without fail, the fox goes into a fit of whining, yapping, and wailing until food is delivered.

Steve and Kita have tried to implement a schedule for the two of them to feed Mavrik, but it’s been a mess, and he found that he doesn’t even want them here that often.  So to avoid the indignant panic of an un-fed fox, he and Mavrik have both wised up. He has gotten back into the habit of reading a clock, and Mavrik has taken to delivering very distinctive nips prior to when he expects to be fed.

According to Steve and Kita’s plan, so much as he has figured it out, Steve is supposed to feed Mavrik this morning, but Steve is running late.  By the time he gets there, Bucky has arranged himself on the couch for Steve’s benefit, complete with a contented fox sprawled across his lap.

“Buck, I’m sorry, I--” Steve breaks off, leaving both the door and his mouth hanging open as he registers the scene that Bucky has presented him with.

Mavrik perks up, and Bucky gives the fox a nudge of encouragement, sending it over to greet Steve.  Around other people, Bucky picks up Mavrik and holds the fox the whole time they’re there, so that they won’t touch it.  Except for Steve and Kita. Steve can touch Mavrik. Kita knows better than to try.

Steve looks up at Bucky, grinning sheepishly at his own astonishment.  “Looks like you’ve, ah--” He gestures at the fox,

Bucky nods.

Steve shifts his weight from one foot to the other, stuffing his hands in his pockets.  “So…”

Bucky has recovered, or developed, just a great enough sliver of tact that he phrases it, “You can leave now,” instead of asking, or even telling Steve to go away.  He knows, in a general sense, that it is possible to be more indirect, but he has no way to do so.

Bucky isn’t sure why he sends Steve off like this, but he refuses to regret it.  Even though Steve’s absence is an ache he feels whenever he thinks about it. Even though the apartment is too empty without Steve, too quiet.

He wanders onto the kitchen, over to the fridge feathered with Steve’s post-its and the single photo.  He knows the contents of the post-its by heart, the words like fragile bridges arching between islands of his own recollections.  He reads them over again, searching for something that will make up for Steve not being there.

He has begun to move them about, to organize them.  Important things go in the center, radiating out from a tight ring around the photo to recollections that are merely incidental.  With a couple of exceptions. Around the edges, in the corners, are a few post-its that he has been avoiding.

Having reviewed most of the rest of the fridge’s surface, he now comes to one of these.  He considers the scrap of paper, plucks it from its corner, and takes it over to the kitchen table to mull over.

> _ “You wouldn’t have been in the war if it weren’t for me. _
> 
> _ “We never talked about it, but I always knew, sort of, that if you felt anything about the war one way or the other, you didn’t want to go off to kill people and die horribly.  I was the one who saw a cause in the war, the one who cared, and you followed that lead regardless. _
> 
> _ “So, the first time, we went together to enlist.  You wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for me. And I don’t know how we expected it to go any other way, when I was rejected and you weren’t. _
> 
> _ “I still remember sitting on the steps of the recruiting office, holding our slips of paper, each with the wrong stamp.  It was as if, for the first time, someone had revealed to me the great unfairness of the world.” _

He can recall that, just that moment.  Not the whole thing, not going to enlist or what he had thought of the war.  But he remembers the stone steps, and Stevie’s narrow shoulders beside his, so close that they touch.  He remembers that moment of silence when their helplessness, laid bare, unfolds around them. How had they ever believed that any other outcome was possible?  It was so obvious.

After that, Steve had regained his resolved, every line of those thin, endearing features hardening into the sharp angles of determination.  Yet it is what comes before that, the momentary reverie of helplessness, which seems so important to him now.

He feels as if there was something about that moment, some secret they had known for an instant and then passed over.  Perhaps, if he examines the memory closely enough, he can recover whatever key is contained there, can bring it back with him into the present and the present will be transformed by it, will realign into a scene of vast symmetry.  That this will make it all make sense.

But if such a revelation exists, he is unable to grasp it, and after a time, he grows indifferent to the memory.  Yet when he replaces it in the mosaic of the refrigerator door, he clears a spot for it at the very center, right beside the photograph.

He has enough distance, now, to allow his thoughts to turn sometimes to the issue of guilt.  He would like to lay all the blame at HYDRA’s feet, as he is certain Steve has done with all but the portion that Steve has kept for himself.  But whatever HYDRA has made him, they did not make him a killer. He has been one since before he ever fell into their power. The exact moment is lost to him, along with much, even most, of the war.  But he knows the circumstances.

They gave him a gun and sent him into the trenches and told him to shoot and he shot.  He did not even have enough faith in what he was doing to resist.

He remembers that he heard, through the strange mythology of war, that on Nazi firing lines, some of the executioners were given guns loaded with nothing but blanks.  Even the Nazis had difficulty aiming at point-blank range unless they could tell themselves that their shots might do nothing.

But Sergeant Barnes’ hand was steady, every time.  Even as he felt the recoil crash through him, he didn’t flinch, didn’t jerk away.  Every time it was a little easier. Every time he felt a little more numb.

He hates the things that HYDRA made him do.  He shudders every time he encounters one of the recollections, scattered through his memories, of missions they sent him on.  He embraces these feelings of horror and revulsion. He leans on them as proof that he is something other than their weapon. But he cannot erase the knowledge that if he had not come to them already a soldier, then the Winter Soldier might never have existed.

There is a circle of humanity, of light and warmth, and he can see that light and feel that warmth.  But he is forever outside.

He tells Steve this, in pieces, when he can.  When the look of loss and grief on Steve’s face and Steve’s attempt to hide it aren’t too great to bear.

He knows what Steve hates most about this; it is the idea of permanence, the thought that what HYDRA has done (what Steve tells himself he has allowed them to do) has left a mark on him, something that can’t be worked past or overcome.

Aside from the obvious, of course.  The metal arm. He can feel with it, actually.  Not like he could before, not like he can with his other arm.  But he can sense pressure, and contact, especially with metal or skin.  He is careful with it, always, aware of its destructive capacity. With Mavrik especially, he favors his right hand, the human hand, the one of muscle, sinew, skin and bone.

When he does approach the fox with the metal hand, be it out of a lapse of attention, or necessity, or intentional curiosity, Mavrik is tentative.  The fox evades contact, winding back around to sniff at the appendage in question, poking it with his pointed snout.

“ _ Don’t know what to make of it, do you _ ?” he asks the fox.

He offers up his right hand as a conciliatory measure.  Mavrik, quick to forgive, replies by chewing on the proffered hand in a friendly, playful manner.

He has not removed the red star that HYDRA marked it with in their pretense at being some hyper-communist cell within the Soviet Union.  He is wary of whatever the removal process will entail. He covers it, mostly, as he covers the entirety of the arm and its crude conjunction with the rest of his body.

A few days earlier, Steve had been over and they had been watching Mavrik jump around the room after his toy ball.  The fox would leap into the air, back arched, nose and all four feet pointed downwards, and land with the ball between his forepaws, then bounce away, having nudged the ball with his muzzle so that he would have to continue to pounce after it.

They were standing in the kitchen door, one against each side of the frame.  Steve scooted one foot over and nudged Bucky’s foot to get his attention. As if he wasn’t always aware of Steve.

“Hey, Buck, you ever think about… you know,” and Steve gestured to mean,  _ your arm _ .

He couldn’t even put into words whether he had thought about it or not, but it reminded him of something he had been thinking about.

“Hey, Stevie, you ever think about--” and he couldn’t quite bring himself to finish it out, but he elbow-scrunched towards Steve to make it clear what he meant.

_ Your everything _ .

Steve looked away and ran a hand through his hair.  “Yeah, I guess we never did get around to talking about it.”  He looked up and grinned. “You miss me being a scrawny little jerk?”

“I sure  _ don’t _ miss you coughing up a lung every other minute.”

“You sure?” Steve prodded.  “You stuck awful close to me for someone who minded coughing fits.”

“Yeah, well.”  He took a deep breath.  “I remember, I always thought I’d have to watch you die, to hold your head as you told me with your last breath that everything was fine--”

He broke off.   _ I knew the shape of your bones _ .

“So if you looking halfway like a stranger is what it took to change that, well then, it’s something I can live with.”

_ I knew the shape of your bones _ .

It is tangled up in feelings, in sounds, in scents.  In the smooth hollow of a shoulder blade under the palm of his hand, the way his fingers fit into the ridges between protruding ribs.  In the faltering glow of staying up late nights, holding tightly to that knife-thin body, wracked with fever, while not so much praying for deliverance as cursing a world that can be so unbelievably shitty to someone so worthy.  In the perfect stillness that sometimes settles over them.

And that, all of that, is gone.

Steve gave some time for the words to settle in, gave Bucky some time to be alone with his thoughts.  Mavrik, on the other hand, showed no such consideration. Having grown tired of his antics with the ball, the fox had stashed it somewhere around the apartment and come over to nudge Bucky on the knee, begging for attention.

Bucky complied, squatting down to better reach the fox, and Mavrik flopped down on one side, panting contentedly.  He murmured to the fox in Russian, making small talk because the look on Steve’s face was worth it. Not so much concerned, not anymore, as much as Steve was trying very hard not to be annoyed.

He lost the arm in the war, in the fall.  That post-it note stays firmly in the corner of the fridge.  Yet he never dreams of falling. Of all the things he dreams about, all the nights he wakes up fighting the sheets in a cold sweat, falling is not one of them.  Not after everything else that happened.

He wants to tell Steve about this, about how he does not dream of the fall.  Because he sees the reflection of it in Steve’s eyes. Over and over, Steve is losing the one person he is closest to in all the world.  He wants to spare Steve reliving that, if he can.

Something stops him, though, some impulse.  He doesn’t know why, but it is as if someone has leaned close to his ear and whispered that  _ it will be easier this way _ .


	9. 6:12am

> “ Their 2-year series of atrocities is sometimes called 'The Silent Holocaust'.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disembowelled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: 'the presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame'. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> Throughout the period of the genocide, the USA continued to provide military support to the Guatemalan government, mainly in the form of arms and equipment. The infamous guerrilla training school, the School of the Americas in Georgia USA, continued to train Guatemalan officers notorious for human rights abuses; the CIA worked with Guatemalan intelligence officers, some of whom were on the CIA payroll despite known human rights violations. US involvement was understood to be strategic - or, put another way, indifferent to the fate of a bunch of Indians - in the wider context of the Cold War and anti-Communist action. ”

-Peace Pledge Union,  _ Genocide- Guatemala _

 

 

When Steve gets the call from Natasha, he’s only surprised that she hadn’t called sooner.

“What took you?” he asks.  “Were HYDRA’s personnel files out of order?”

“Oh, HYDRA were  _ excellent _ record-keepers.  The Colombians, on the other hand, well.  I spent a week wandering the streets of Bogotá, being told that the ones I was looking for were  _ desaparecidos _ , and having doors shut in my face.  According to the public record, the last member of the family died over fifty years ago.”

“I take it that’s not the whole story?” he asks, and gets a derisive snort in reply.

She tells him what she’s found.

“You’re lucky I owe you one, Rogers.”

“Oh, I’m sure the international superspy was  _ terribly _ inconvenienced by a missing persons case.”

“I tend to favor more direct methods.  Especially when the person in question is not actually missing.”

And just like that, she hangs up, not even bothering to say goodbye.  Steve tucks the phone into his jacket pocket and heads around the corner to Bucky’s apartment, where no doubt Bucky and Kita were already wondering what’s taking him, as they have undoubtedly noticed his approach long before.

Over the last few weeks, Kita’s attitude towards the three of them meeting has become much more resigned, even cooperative.  She doesn’t seem as if she’s always wanting to leave, and she drops defensively off-putting comments on a much less regular basis.  If he didn’t know better, Steve might think she’s beginning to think of the three of them as a team.

Bucky is already at the door when Steve reaches to knock, and has decided to greet him by depositing Mavrik on his chest without warning.  As Steve scrambles to adequately support the fox’s body, he could swear that Bucky’s omnipresent stoic glower is no more than a facade, and that behind it, he’s laughing his ass off.

Just as Steve is getting more or less situated with Mavrik, Bucky reaches out, calling something Slavic-sounding.  In response, the fox leaps back to its owner and drapes itself over Bucky’s shoulders. Steve grins and intentionally jostles Bucky on their way to the kitchen.

Kita is waiting in the kitchen, as watchful and unsmiling as ever.  Steve can see, now, that she sits a little stiller, a little straighter when all three of them are in the room.  He doesn’t go so far as to try to appear nonthreatening. He knows she would think that was condescending. But he keeps his greeting low-key-- just a nod-- and doesn’t hold it against her when she doesn’t respond.

Bucky finishes up getting coffee and ambles over, bringing a mug to Steve.  They sit down, taking up their usual places around the kitchen table, Steve and Kita facing each other on opposite sides, Bucky on the the third side, between them, opposite the window, all three variously slouching or sprawling in their chairs.

Steve takes a sip of coffee.  “So,” he begins, “what’s the situation?”

“Quiet,” Kita answers.  “As usual.”

Steve nods.  From a tactical standpoint, her line-of-sight surveillance is close to the ground-- in a good position to respond to an immediate threat, but unable to provide much of anything in the way of advance warning.  That means the wider view of things is up to Steve, for the most part.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on the headlines,” Kita volunteers, unexpectedly.

That’s good. She knows better than any of them what to look for.  “Notice anything?’

She shakes her head.  “No. Nothing concrete.  But here’s a list of charity events you might want to keep an eye on.”  She pulls out a folded scrap of paper and pushes it across the table at Steve, who takes it and stuffs it in his pocket.

“I could put in a few appearances, maybe,” he offers.  After all, it will raise absolutely no suspicion if Captain America attends a few benefit dinners. “Depending on the cause,”

Something about this comment ticks Kita off, he can tell, because for an instant, her eyes narrow infinitesimally.

Steve turns to Bucky.  “See anything?”

“All quiet.”

“Remember anything?”

The corner of Buck’s mouth twitches into a momentary half-grin.  “Remember a sketch you did of our composition teacher.”

Steve remembers the sketch, and he remembers the teacher, and the look of regret and disappointment on his face when Steve had told him that he was leaving school to work.  Steve had regretted the sketch then, and regretted posting it up in the main entrance hall after a particularly long-winded and self-important lecture from the composition teacher.

“‘Course you’d remember that.”  He sighs. “As far as things are on my end, there’s a whole lot that could be wrong, but I can’t say anything for certain.  I’m being kept in the dark about official status, but that’s just how it goes.” Even if you’re Captain America, that’s how it goes.

When he’s finished, the three of them sit quietly, all failing to bring up any further topic of conversation.  Shortly, Kita appears to decide that she’s put her time in, and she gets up and leaves.

Steve waits for her to go before he asks Bucky, “Wait a sec, would you?  I’ve got something to check out.”

Bucky nods in response, and Steve leaves his half-finished cup of coffee on the table as a promise that he’ll be back.  He follows Kita out of the apartment, and sees that she’s already a ways down the street by the time he steps onto the sidewalk.  She can’t have missed that he’s following her, but she doesn’t turn to face Steve. She must be ignoring him, then.

He calls, “Manuela!”

She keeps walking.

“Manuela Josefina Ramos!”

She stops and turns, staring him down with a look of contempt.

“Congratulations,” she snarls, “you dug up the name of one of countless casualties.  So what?”

Steve isn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t this.  “Doesn’t that name mean anything to you?”

“That name hasn’t meant anything for over twenty years.  Not since soldiers stormed the Ramos family home, shot them, and dumped their bodies in a shallow grave.”  Her voice is shaking with anger. “But why does that matter? That happened far away, didn’t it? In a country where violence is normal and life is cheap, right?”

“No,” he protests, “that’s not--”

_ That’s not true. _

But did that matter, if the world acted as if it was?

He realized that  _ truth _ was not the real issue.  What she said-- that Colombia was  _ a country where violence is normal and life is cheap _ \-- held a certain resonance.  It was convenient. It was easy to believe.  If you heard it enough times, not said outright, but implied, you could be indifferent.

“--that’s not how I see it,” Steve amends weakly.

“Oh, your poor bleeding heart.  Must be terrible, carrying the weight of all the world’s suffering on your shoulders when you don’t even know what happened.”

He takes the bait.  “So, what did happen?”

She looks him straight in they eye.  “Juan Carlos Ramos owned a newspaper in Bogotá.  His family was well-educated and they had money, but they were communists.  Juan Carlos used his newspaper,  _ La Estrella Colombiana _ , to criticize corrupt officials and the exploitation of the Colombian people.  In particular, he hated the complicity of the CIA and the American corporations that benefited from these practices.”

Steve holds off commenting and listens patiently as she continues.

“Many times, he was warned to stop.  His daughter was even kidnapped and tortured.  That’s why his daughter’s daughter, Manuela, bore his family name.  But to Juan Carlos, the truth and the lives of those who had no voice were more important even than the lives of his own family.

“So one night, soldiers-- military, paramilitary, it’s impossible to tell-- stormed the Ramos family house and shot everyone they found there.  Including Juan Carlos, his son, the son’s wife and their three children, his daughter, the family housekeeper, and Manuela Josefina Ramos, his granddaughter.  She was seven years old.”

“That’s terrible.”  Steve can’t think what else to say.

“What, that they died?  That’s nothing. Everyone dies.  You know what’s terrible? They’re among hundreds, thousands, millions.  Every day, people are imprisoned, and tortured, and killed, and die of starvation and disease, all so Americans can live easy, comfortable lives.”

The pieces start to fall into place; what Kita thought she was doing when she was working for HYDRA, why she won’t turn herself in.  “You blame Americans?”

“Of course I do!”  All pretense of discipline and composure are gone from Kita, and she’s very nearly shouting at Steve.  “Sure, the soldiers that killed the Ramos family were Colombians, but their salaries were paid by American dollars, their orders issued by officers trained at the School of the Americas, their priorities set by politicians catering to American business interests, lest they fall prey to the CIA’s habit of assassinating or deposing foreign leaders who fail to comply.

“The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, all of it exists because other people are suffering.  And if they dare to ask for more, they are called terrorists, and their lives are worth less than nothing.”

When Kita finishes, she crosses her arms over her chest, and Steve can see her jaw clench.  He is taken aback. He had not expected her motivations to be so coherent or so grounded in moral principles.  What’s more, he cannot easily dismiss her claims.

But then he recalls something, an image of flickering newsreels in the dark below an abandoned bunker, as a voice he had thought long-dead proclaims,  _ HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally willing to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security _ .

“You don’t think HYDRA could have been responsible?”

“For what?” she spits.  “For a global economic system?  For the entire foreign policy of all the world’s wealthiest nations?  Even if they put all their effort into pushing the world in this direction, do you think for a  _ second _ that they could have pulled it off without the willing cooperation of countless others, motivated only by short-sighted greed?  No, you’re just trying to find someone else, some outsider, to blame for the wrongs done by your country.”

Steve has only one more thing to ask.  “But, Manuela didn’t die, did she?”

This, like everything else he has said during the exchange, only serves to make her angrier.  “No seven-year-old girl could have survived that.”

She ends with something almost like a snarl, and is still for a moment, challenging him to respond.  When he doesn’t, she turns and leaves, squaring her shoulders once more into a stern, military posture.  He lets her go, then turns and heads back to Bucky’s apartment.

For a while, Steve and Bucky go through the usual routine of casual banter mingling with genuine compassion and punctuated by Bucky’s frequent silences.  Then Steve catches himself up, catches himself thinking of it as the usual routine where before it has never been an act, or a procedure, and he realizes that he’s distracted, so he brings it up.

“Hey,”  He taps Bucky on the shoulder with the back of his fingers.  “With Kita, did you ever know about--”

“Did I know about her past?”

Steve nods.  “Yeah.”

“Of course.  Everyone knew, if they knew anything about her.  And,” he fixes Steve with an intense look, and Steve makes sure to hold it, “I went on a mission, once, to help her kill the man who was her father.”

Steve nods carefully.  The man who was her father, who was not a part of the Ramos family.  He wants to know more, but he knows that neither he nor Bucky are ready to discuss it.

When he gets back to his own apartment, Steve checks over the translated documents that Nat sent him earlier, and sure enough, they indicates that Manuela Josefina Ramos made it to the USSR and is still operating under the codename of Nemesis.  What, then, did she mean by “no seven-year-old could survive that”?

This, of course is the least of what is bothering him about what she said.  Her claims all rang true. And if they are, then what? He cannot simply sit by while things like the Ramos family’s deaths are carried out, especially not if he is the benefactor, and least of all if he is made in some way complicit.  Suddenly, sparing Kita is no longer a matter of obliging Bucky.

It will take time, Steve tells himself, to figure things out.  Doing so immediately is neither required nor possible, as there are other things he must attend to.  He puts the papers down with a sigh and moves on to one of those other matters.

The elevated mercury levels that Bucky’s physical evaluation revealed worries him.  It has worried him the whole whole time, but until recently, he has accepted that there was nothing he could do about it.  His suspicions, although those of a layman, are that it has something to do with the arm, and it has only been very recently that Bucky has been willing to so much as acknowledge that the arm exists.  Steve knows that it will still be a lot to ask that Bucky let someone take a look at it, but--

But Steve knows that Bucky is capable of a lot, and that this might be a question of life or death.  And, not least among considerations, Steve wants a second opinion, one from a source that could, at the very least, have a lot to lose from lying to him.

The number that Steve dials is for Tony’s personal cell, but Pepper is the one to pick up.

“Stark Industries,” she answers, not with a secretary’s lilt, but with the firm, even tone of someone who knows they pretty much own the place.

Steve likes Pepper.  She’s hardworking, and practical, and just underhanded enough when she needs to be.  Seeing how she’s the one on the line, he decides to make the arrangements through her, and they settle the affair in an amiably businesslike manner.

As a result of this exchange, two days later, Steve is accompanying Tony Stark, riding alongside in the flashy red sports car that Tony pilots with abandon.  Following Steve’s directions, when it suits him, Tony eyes their progress to Bucky’s apartment with dismay.

As they pull up a half block away from the building, Tony surveys the area and says, “Looks like your people went all out on this one.  Prime location,” gesturing at the run-down corner shop across the street, “gorgeous views,” he widens his gesture to include a small cluster of men, as weathered-looking as the store they stand in front of.

Steve bristles at the inclusion of the locals in Tony’s poor opinion of the place.  “He’s the one who chose it,” he says.

“Trying to recapture the old Soviet squallor?”

Steve gives a faux-modest half-shrug.  “Same sort of neighborhood we grew up in, actually.”

Tony brushes off the response and makes a point of arming the car’s security before heading off towards the apartment  building. Steve sighs and goes to lead him in, seeing as how Steve is the only one of them who knows which apartment they’re headed to.

Steve talked to Bucky about this as soon as it was set up, and made a point of mentioning it any number of times since then, including during the call he made to let Bucky know he’d be heading over with Tony.  But when they get to the door, Steve knocks and waits, he doesn’t let himself in. And Steve can tell, when Bucky opens the door, that he’s still uneasy, still not quite all there. Steve doesn’t like that, but he’s expecting it.

What he isn’t expecting is Kita.  She’s across the room from them, leaning up against the far wall.  Does Bucky trust her enough to ask her to be here for this, or is it just a coincidence?

As she straightens up and moves closer, Steve sees one of her hands twitch, and he realizes that she and Bucky are hand-signing furiously back and forth.  She is glaring, not at Steve, but over his shoulder, at Tony. Then, Kita and Bucky must settle things, because Kita edges around Bucky, skirts Steve, and shoulder-checks Tony on her way out the door.  Tony stares after her, while she does nothing to so much as acknowledge his presence. When she’s about halfway across the parking lot, Tony turns back to Steve and Bucky.

“Well,” he says, “don’t think I’ve run across a stranger who hated me that much for a while.  At least,” he grins in a way he must think is dashing, “I think she’s a stranger.”

Steve looks over his shoulder to study Kita’s retreating back, then back at Bucky.  “What were you two saying to each other?”

“Just reminding her that Stark isn’t a target.”

Steve nods carefully.  He can think of a number of reasons that Kita might look at Tony as a target, and it certainly explains her actions.  He’ll have to ask her about it afterwards.

Tony, meanwhile, is not so satisfied with this exchange.

“Great!”  He throws his hands in the air.  “So glad to hear that I’m  _ not _ a target!”

As the three make their way into the kitchen, Steve notices that Bucky scoops Mavrik up before Tony has a chance to show interest in the fox.  They seat themselves around the kitchen table, Tony taking Kita’s spot-- and, much to Steve’s private amusement, mirroring Kita’s habitual slouch-- across from the window.  Bucky keeps a close hold on the fox, who in turn displays no interest in having anything to do with the newcomer.

Today is just to talk things over, which both Bucky and Tony are terrible at, so it falls to Steve to prod both of them into having a reasonably productive exchange.  By turns, Steve takes it upon himself to prompt Bucky to divulge any knowledge or concerns he might have about the hardware attached to his shoulder, then coerce Tony into sharing as much as possible about his thoughts on the matter and what sorts of procedures he might be likely to need.

With each question, Tony becomes more irritated and squirrely.  Steve knows that he dislikes explaining technological things to people who don’t have the requisite background to catch whatever lingo he throws at them, but even so, of all the difficult conversational partners Steve’s had lately, Tony might be the worst.

It comes as little surprise, then, when the business magnate and engineering genius takes his leave abruptly, before Steve thinks the conversation is really over.  Presumably, Tony’s headed back to the car to crunch numbers or draw up plans or something else that Steve would find opaquely scientific.

“Hey, Buck.”

He catches Bucky’s attention and studies his friend, trying to gauge how traumatic the preceding discussion has been.

A gun fires.  Outside.

Steve rushes to the door to see Tony in the street, backing towards his car, and about level with Steve, Kita is following him, pistol raised.  There’s a suit in the car, Steve knows, and if Tony can make it there--

Another shot.  The muzzle of Kita’s gun flashes.

Tony staggers, falls to one knee.  Kita drops the gun and runs, passing Steve and unsheathing the pair of long, dark knives that Steve hasn’t seen since that fight in the unfinished house, and he realizes, too late, that she is going to kill him.

Then he is knocked aside as something-- some _ one _ \-- rushes past and collides with Kita.  The Winter Soldier lands a few solid hits on her, then flings her through the air into a parked car.  She hits the driver’s side window with a crunch, and it erupts into a spiderweb of cracks behind her. She does nothing to resist.  He strides up to her, pauses, then lunges forward and strikes her jaw with a final crosscut.

Steve moves forward, grabbing the pistol from the pavement where it has fallen on his way, and raising it to cover Kita-- to cover  _ Nemesis _ .  To his left, Tony swears loudly, but he is focused on the other two, uncertain how this confrontation will end.  Kita stands unmoving, head still turned from the force of the final blow, refusing to look at anything, chin raised defiantly.  But it is defiance in defeat, and she seems aware of that.

“Get him out of here.”  Bucky instructs, jerking his chin towards Tony.

Steve looks back and forth between them.  As reluctant as he is to leave now, he tells himself that if Bucky wants to handle the situation, Bucky can handle the situation.  He ejects the magazine from the gun, ejects the chambered round, sticks the gun and the the magazine in his sweatshirt pocket, and turns to go get Tony.


	10. 7:22am

> These are outsiders, always. These stars—
> 
> these iron inklings of an Irish January,
> 
> whose light happened
> 
> thousands of years before
> 
> our pain did; they are, they have always been
> 
> outside history.
> 
> They keep their distance. Under them remains
> 
> a place where you found
> 
> you were human, and
> 
> a landscape in which you know you are mortal.
> 
> And a time to choose between them.
> 
> I have chosen:
> 
> out of myth in history I move to be
> 
> part of that ordeal
> 
> whose darkness is
> 
> only now reaching me from those fields,
> 
> those rivers, those roads clotted as
> 
> firmaments with the dead.
> 
> How slowly they die
> 
> as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.
> 
> And we are too late. We are always too late.

-Eavan Boland, “Outside History”

 

 

There had been a time when she had wanted simple justice.  A time when all the pain and anger she felt at what had been done to her had left her hungry to see another suffer as she had suffered, and to die.  A time when these desires had focused down on a single man.

But now is not that time, and Tony Stark is not that man.

She does not hate Stark, as she had told Barnes in the aftermath of her attack on him.   _ I just know how much harm he does, and I know how much the world would be better off without him _ .  He had yanked her forward and then slammed her back against the side of the car.  She waited, but he had said nothing.

“So, are you going to kill me?” she had asked him.

“Don’t… just, don’t,” he had snarled.

She hadn’t promised anything, but he had let her go anyways.

  
  


She remembers what it was like to hate someone.  The man who was her father. She had not been told who he was, but it had not been difficult to find someone who met the criteria.  She had known what she was looking for-- dates and places-- and all of it was, if not public record, then readily available to her. The man she found, a paramilitary contractor who had prospered carrying out unscrupulous operations, was everything he had anticipated he would be.

And so she had asked for a favor.  She had asked that the Winter Soldier be sent with her on a mission of her own devising.

“ _ Going to avenge your death _ ?” Irina had asked, when she came by with the assignment folder.  “ _ Удачи _ .”

  
  


She has returned to her usual post, but with her back to the window, now.  There is no need to watch. No one is coming. No one has ever been coming.  If HYDRA is still looking to reclaim their asset, they will not put feet on the ground.  The only reason she let herself think otherwise was that it gave her an excuse to stay here, to put off leaving and moving on.

Someone is walking around downstairs.  She waits. The footsteps travel up the stairs and stop in front of her door.

The intruder knocks.

She doesn’t respond.  No point in it.

The door opens and Rogers enters the room, wearing an expression of troubled disappointment.

“What do you want?”

He leans against the door frame, arms folded across his chest.  “You do know that you can’t just go around killing people, don’t you?”

“Right, because  _ here _ , people’s lives have value.  Do you know how much better off the world would be if Tony Stark were dead?”

She sees the way that anger tugs at Rogers’ features.

“And I don’t mean his whole Merchant of Death phase.  Stark the philanthropist? Stark the font of infrastructure development?  He’s  _ worse _ .”

Rogers scrutinizes her, eyebrows twitching with skepticism despite his obvious attempt to conceal it.  “How so? The man’s a walking Ayn Rand novel, not a tyrant.”

“That green power project in Central America, centered around the Santa Rita dam in Guatemala?  Well, last time that sort of thing came up, it kicked off a small-scale genocide. Estimated two hundred thousand dead.  The Mayans living nearby didn’t want their homes flooded, and it was easier to kill them than to change plans or negotiate.  There have already been deaths associated with Santa Rita for the same reason.”

“Tony would never--”

“Stark would never connect his own actions with such outcomes.  Nonetheless, Stark Industries is a major investor in the Santa Rita project.  Throwing that kind of money around, pouring it into the very same channels that have, for decades, fueled nothing but conflict and suffering?  Stopping that would be worth far more than just one life.”

As she says this, she feels the weight of the deep, dark certainty that is there for her, always.  No matter what she wants, or wanted, from life, the truth will be with her, always, binding her to the knowledge that she must do something to change this.

“Is that how you work?” Rogers asks, horrified.  “You add up potential calamity until some doomsday ledger tells you it justifies murder?”

“I go in with my eyes open.  I know it doesn’t even out, but everything has a price.  If all lives are worthy of protecting, two hundred thousand is a hell of a lot bigger than one.  You’ve done that math, haven’t you? Didn’t you weigh the lives of German soldiers against stopping the terrible thing thing they were a part of?  Or are you going to explain how that was different?”

Anyone else, she figures, and they’d just dismiss her.  What she was fighting would seem unreal to them, insofar as they accepted it as simply the way things worked.  But Rogers, damn him, gives every indication of having taken it fully into consideration.

“Is that how you think of the Winter Soldier?” he asks.  Kita flinches, looking away. “As the price you pay for stopping something terrible?”

She doesn’t respond.  She can’t.

“Countering atrocity with atrocity is the means HYDRA sold you.  It isn’t the only way.”

“Oh, really?  Like what? Going on a speaking tour, so that concerned citizens can listen and nod solemnly to one another before going back to their lives?  Leveraging whatever modest income I can put together in the hopes of negating the effects of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world?”

She goes on.  “It’s awful, what I do.  I hate it. No matter what I tell myself about the righteousness of my cause, of course it would feel better to do nothing.  But clean hands and a clean conscience are a luxury bought with the suffering of others.”

She squares her shoulders and meets his eyes, and it is as if they are truly seeing each other for the first time, two fierce sharp creatures facing off across some vast divide.  She knows, she can see it by looking at him, by the way he glances away and shifts his weight from foot to foot, that she’s brought him as far around to understanding her as she can, but all she feels is defeat.

_ Clean hands and a clean conscience are a luxury bought with the suffering of others. _ There it is, the truth, bare and broken and wretched, about what it means to try to be a truly good person.

“Then why are you still here?” he asks.

Is he baiting her?  She glares at him in reply.  There isn’t a reason. Of course there isn’t a reason.  Just guilt, the inevitable guilt of wading into an awful, desperate conflict.

Steve speaks again, when she doesn’t answer.  “Let me take care of Stark.”

_ He can’t mean- _

“You have info on what he’s doing?” he asks.

Of course he doesn’t.

She nods and pulls out a folder.  The contents are in Russian, and they came from sources which may or may not have known they were working for HYDRA, but the info checks out.  Rogers takes the file and flips through it. He snaps it shut and waves it towards Kita.

“Is this all true?”

“Check it, by all means.  I always did.”

She can see the way “always” clicks with him.  “Are there more of these?” He indicates the file.

“One for every mission.”  Kita looks him straight in the eye, now, folding her arms over her chest.  “Enough to damn the target, every time.”

“Every mission? Was there one for me?”

She nods.  “There was.  Is. Though it wasn’t entirely convincing.  First time for everything, I suppose.”

“Can I have it?”

“Oh, right, so I can have another round with the TSA and whoever the hell is guarding those files.  Yes, that will  _ definitely _ go unnoticed.  You want that file, you go get it.”

“What sort of thing was in it?”

“Did you think the timing of the Smithsonian exhibit, right before the launching of Project Insight, was a coincidence?  You’re the media darling, the story that gets trotted out any time they don’t want anyone looking too closely at the facts.  You dressed yourself in the stars and stripes. There’s not a whole lot that hasn’t been done in your name.”

She expects Rogers to brush aside the accusations, to balk at the idea of being held accountable for how his image is used.  Instead, he reacts with a discontented scowl.

“Well, then.”  Rogers gives her a sardonic mock-salute with the folder and turns to go.

Kita feels an urge to call him back, to ask him something to make him turn around.  But she can’t quite figure out what to say.

  
  


The man her research had indicated as her father lived in an estate outside of Bogotá.  It was the first time she had been back to Colombia since she fled, following her family’s communist contacts until they lead her out, to the USSR in its dying days.  She has gone a few more times since then, always on business.

She had done her homework, had memorized the layout of the estate before heading out, but even so, once on the ground, she had found the layout exhaustively familiar.  The guard post, with a single occupant brought down with a shot from the Winter Soldier’s gun. The wide, pale green lawn dotted with patches of flowers and fruit trees.  The driveway, winding its way up to a cul-de-sac in front of the shaded compound of arcaded buildings and fountained courtyards where the officer and his family lived.

They swept through the house like avenging angels, a brainwashed super-soldier and an angry seventeen-year-old girl.  They worked methodically, from room to room, splitting up to cover more ground and quickly subduing any commotion or opposition.  She could hear her partner moving through the compound, his whistled signals and short bursts of gunfire.

She was the one who found the officer, the man who was her father, the one her research had indicated.  He was coming out of the bath, with just enough time to pull on an overshirt and grab a gun from a side table.  He raised the gun and fired, but he might as well have been blindfolded for all the chance he had of hitting her.

Even so, she disarmed him, grabbing the handle of the gun and slashing his hand to make him release it.  She wanted him to confront him, wanted him to know why he was going to die, and his gun lying bloodied on the floor while she kept a knife pointed at his throat were the means by which she ensured that.  He tried to stare her down, refusing to accept that a scrawny teenage girl was the form his death had taken.

“ _ ¿Quien eres? _ ” he demanded.

When she had envisioned this moment, she had imagined telling him everything.  That was what she had worked for, the whole point of hunting him down. Whether or not he was willing to accept the blame for the horror she had suffered, she would make him live that responsibility.

She hesitated.   _ Was that all _ , she asked herself,  _ all that her life would amount to? _

And, for the first time, she was overcome with the sense of her life as a part of something greater; a greater tragedy, a greater inequity, a greater struggle.

“ _ No soy nadie _ ,” she said.  “ _ Soy la venganza de la tierra _ .”

And with that, she plunged the knife into the soft flesh of the side of the man’s throat, below the jaw, and dragged the blade down and across, leaving a wound like a tear in a sheet left hanging to dry.  He bled out in a matter of moments.

  
  
  


In time, she goes back.  Back to dropping off Chinese-American takeout and drinking coffee sitting at the chipped formica kitchen table.  She tells herself that it is enough that Rogers will listen to her, but she knows a lie when she hears one.

_ Then why are you still here? _

There is still one thing, one cord that binds her.  Has always bound her.

_ The looser the leash, the further it reaches. _

Irina was just fucking with her, just  _ pulling her chain _ , as it were, when she called that night to give Kita the code.  She’s cruel like that. But in that cruelty, she has shown Kita the links of that chain, and given her a means to sever it.

She is not the one to suggest that they go for a run again, but she might have, given time.  Instead, Rogers takes that part. They are in the kitchen, sitting in the empty silence left by her own return to a strict efficiency of communication.  Perhaps, the suggestion is meant as a peace offering, a sign that things have gone back to the way they were.

But they haven’t-- they can’t, not ever.  The pillars of willful denial supporting that ceasefire are gone, crumbled back into the ashes of which they had always been built.

Kita does not tell herself that she isn’t ready, doesn’t make some excuse not to join them.  There is nothing to be gained by waiting. She has waited long enough already.

She gathers together the coffee mugs, dumping them into the sink so that she can scrub at them, fervently, her back squarely to the rest of the apartment.  Voices drift from the other room, where Barnes and Rogers are dealing with the fox, but she wills herself not to pay enough attention to know what is being said.

They head out shortly after that.  Lawns, curbsides, and empty lots alike are all covered with a solid layer of snow, but the road and sidewalks are clear.  The route is automatic, now, as is the pace. The whole act of going for a run has been ritualized, leaving Kita with nothing to distract her from what she is going to do.

They reach the park, and veer off into the snowy woods.  Rogers still hasn’t gotten a whole lot better at covering this sort of ground, still too stiff and cautious, too human.  She and Barnes pass him. Then they come to the paved area where they usually wait for Rogers. But this time, she does not position herself in expectation of his arrival.

She does not hesitate; the timing is close enough as it is.  She speaks a series of syllables, which only sounds Russian because it was created by Russian speakers.  It is not words. It would not occur in normal speech. It would be very hard to say this sequence by accident.  And, like a dog salivating at the ring of a bell, he explodes into a murderous frenzy, lunging at her. She tries not to flinch.

He strikes at her, and she staggers.  Another hit lands near her collar, and she feels bone snap.  She is lifted off her feet as metal in the shape of fingers closes around her throat--she can’t breathe-- and her back is slammed into a tree trunk.

She struggles involuntarily, feet kicking against the bark of the tree, fingers scrabbling uselessly at her throat.  She tries to stay aware, tries to stay still and calm and in control, but the reaction is buried too deep, and it is only after she has dropped to the ground, and he is halfway across the clearing, shouting at her, that she becomes aware that he is no longer choking her.

So, it is done, now.  She has spoken and despite himself, Orpheus has looked back.  What she has done-- activating the Winter Soldier’s hard-coded conditioning to kill her-- is unforgivable, and she knows it is unforgivable, a burned bridge.

But he did not kill her.  Somehow, deep down, in the most honest and least conscious part of his mind, he must not have wanted to kill her, otherwise she would be dead.  She has offered her life in recompense, more than offered, and he has not taken it. There is nothing more she can give; she is, in a way, absolved.  And so, nothing remains here for her but to go, now, back to her shadow-twin of this world, back to her world of violence and ruin, with the knowledge that she can never, ever, return.


	11. 10:47am

> O, let America be America again—   
>  The land that never has been yet—   
>  And yet must be—the land where  _ every _ man is free.   
>  The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—   
>  Who made America,   
>  Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,   
>  Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,   
>  Must bring back our mighty dream again.   
>    
>  Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—   
>  The steel of freedom does not stain.   
>  From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,   
>  We must take back our land again,   
>  America!   
>    
>  O, yes,   
>  I say it plain,   
>  America never was America to me,   
>  And yet I swear this oath—   
>  America will be!

-from Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

 

 

Summer has come, and with it, the sun-soaked heat that shimmers off the pavement and dyes the world pale gold.  Steve and Bucky lounge on worn-out lawn chairs set out in front of Bucky’s apartment. Glasses of cold water sit on the ground beside them, beading with condensation.  Mavrik sprawls, panting, beside his owner’s chair, and Bucky hangs his arm over to pet the fox absently.

From time to time, Mavrik decides that this is not enough attention, and scurries between one chair and the other, prodding and licking their occupants.  Steve will then go find some toy or another and throw it alongside the building for the fox to fetch, again and again, until Mavrik refuses to retrieve the item and goes back to lying by his owner’s side.

In the kitchen of the apartment behind them, a picture is taped to the center of the fridge.  The picture is of a snowy field, dotted with smoky copses of leafless trees. There is a dark line of woods rising in the middle distance, and the faint outline of mountains hover above them, against the muddy grey of the clouded sky.

As Steve sits in front of Bucky’s apartment, reveling in the pleasant weather and the hard-won calm of his friend’s company, his thoughts begin to drift.  It has been months since Kita’s departure, and the final shocking act of violence that preceded it. The primary horrors of this act-- her willingness to rob Bucky of his agency, and the existence of the means to do so-- have lost their immediacy in light of her subsequent departure.  It is that distance, perhaps, that tangible absence, that summons her memory into being between them.

According to all official and unofficial sources, right after the incident in the park, Kita-- Nemesis-- vanished.  Shortly afterwards, there was a series of assassinations of US military contractors working in Latin American countries, made prominent in their publicity.  The first few were executed flawlessly, but as they went on, evidence began to pile up, culminating in a grainy image of the assailant caught on a bank’s security camera.  Steve was sure before he saw the image that it was Kita, and one look confirmed this. After that, news of her has been scarce.

While the assassinations are condemned through all official channels, the culprit has become, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a folk icon.  And so, the grand confrontation between Captain America and Nemesis-- which had never happened in person-- is carried out in street art, across the sides of abandoned buildings around the world, but particularly in Latin America.  Steve’s handlers, the invisible network that surrounds him and tries, more and more often unsuccessfully, to filter the information he receives, do not want him to see these images. He has found them anyways.

The popular depiction of her is deeply influenced by Latin American imagery.  She is most often depicted wearing a white shirt and jeans, hair unbound, holding an assault rifle, with a belt of ammunition slung across her chest, and a pair of snowy white wings springing from her back.  An angel of revolution, leading crowds of common folk into revolt.

Likewise, the image of Captain America is also transformed.  Visually, it matches every other, more official presentation of the subject.  But he is portrayed shielding symbols of military power, corporate greed, police brutality, and political corruption.

The murals, if they have any titles at all, are called things like “La Vergüenza” or “Los Desaparecidos Regresarán.”  And, in this, there is a note of fatalistic irony. Even armed to the teeth and gifted with angelic form, Nemesis has little hope of victory.  In mural after spray-painted mural, she is frozen, poised on the edge of a fight she cannot win. One artist, either aware of her family’s history or by uncanny coincidence, goes so far as to label her with a flowing banner that reads, “La Estrella Colombiana.”

The street art weighs heavy on Steve’s mind.  He wishes that he could be more shocked at seeing his image presented as it is, but that, he knows, is what America  _ is _ to much of the world.  If Captain America is to appear differently to them, first America  _ itself _ must appear differently, and there are a whole lot of things that must change to make that a reality.  There must be a way, a way of ending the suffering and injustice that fuels that image. And he, of all people, must be capable of it.

Bucky, as if reading his mind, asks, “What now?”

“It’s all well and good, you know, punching out sophomoric chaos gods.”

Bucky grins.  “I’ve heard.”

“And I’m sure someone needs to do it.”  Steve takes a drink of his water. “And back in the day, I’d say I was uniquely qualified.  But I’m starting to think they’re not the biggest jerks in the room.”

“Of course, shouldn’t expect you of all people to settle for a fair fight.”

“Thing is, I don’t think a fight is gonna do much good here.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They lapse into silence, for a time.  Steve breaks it with a sigh.

“What am I supposed to do, Buck?  Stroll on over to the White House, tell them they’ve got to change everything?  I may be Captain America, but I’m not the president.”

“You could be.”

Bucky doesn’t look over at Steve, and the way he cocks his head to the side is casual, light, by his standards.  But even accounting for the now-usual flat harshness of his tone, he sounds like he might be serious.

“You think so?” Steve asks.

“Can’t think of a whole lot of things that could stop you.  Or people who’d vote against you.”

“I suppose there’s advantages to being more picture than person.  President, huh? It’s a long ways from fighting jerks in an alley.  Couldn’t go around picking those fights anymore, for one thing.”

Bucky snorts.  “Sure couldn’t.  Punk.”

“Idiot.”

They lapse into silence again, taking drinks from their glasses from time to time.  Mavrik makes his rounds.

“‘Course, if I go off and--” Steve waves in the vague direction of the nation’s capital, somewhere across the Potomac, “someone’s going to have to take up the banner of Captain America.”

“You mean,  _ wear _ the banner.”

Steve snickers.  “Fair enough.”

“Are you asking me to do that?”

“‘Asking’ might be overstating the situation.  Who says I’m really stepping down?”

Bucky is quiet, takes a long drink from his glass.  He stares out across the summer-colored city.

“I’ve done a lot of fighting, Steve.  Sometimes, I think maybe, you know, maybe it’s enough.”  He looks over at Steve with that same, old, half-bitter smile.  “But heck, those sophomoric chaos gods aren’t gonna punch themselves in the face.”

“That and, you know, going around all Star-on-Chest, being a light in the darkness and all that.”

Bucky shakes his head.  “I wouldn’t go back to fighting, not for anyone else.  But for you--” he trails off. “For you, I’d do anything, always.  I’m yours, ‘till the end of the line.”

“Yeah,” Steve replies softly.  “I know.”

Far away, in a lonely field several dozen miles north of the nearest town, the ground has thawed for the summer, and is thick with grass and flowers.  Copses of birch trees dot the field, white trunks and pale green leaves that whisper in the faint breeze. A dark line of woods edges the field, and beyond, the deep blue outline of mountains against the hazy sky.  A blast sounds, and a plume of smoke rises from something hidden in the woods. A signal. Nemesis is returning.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to keep tabs on my work (and get access to tie-ins like the soundtrack on 8-tracks) follow me here: https://clockworkroseswriting.tumblr.com


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